We introduce a novel semi-supervised video segmentation approach based on an efficient video representation, called as "super-trajectory". Each super-trajectory corresponds to a group of compact trajectories that exhibit consistent motion patterns, similar appearance and close spatiotemporal relationships. We generate trajectories using a probabilistic model, which handles occlusions and drifts in a robust and natural way. To reliably group trajectories, we adopt a modified version of the density peaks based clustering algorithm that allows capturing rich spatiotemporal relations among trajectories in the clustering process. The presented video representation is discriminative enough to accurately propagate the initial annotations in the first frame onto the remaining video frames. Extensive experimental analysis on challenging benchmarks demonstrate our method is capable of distinguishing the target objects from complex backgrounds and even reidentifying them after long-term occlusions.
 Video saliency, aiming for estimation of a single dominant object in a sequence, offers strong object-level cues for unsupervised video object segmentation. In this paper, we present a geodesic distance based technique that provides reliable and temporally consistent saliency measurement of superpixels as a prior for pixel-wise labeling. Using undirected intra-frame and inter-frame graphs constructed from spatiotemporal edges or appearance and motion, and a skeleton abstraction step to further enhance saliency estimates, our method formulates the pixel-wise segmentation task as an energy minimization problem on a function that consists of unary terms of global foreground and background models, dynamic location models, and pairwise terms of label smoothness potentials. We perform extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on benchmark datasets. Our method achieves superior performance in comparison to the current state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and speed. With ever-increasing volumes of video data, automatic extraction of salient object regions became even more significant for visual analytic solutions. This surge has also opened up opportunities for taking advantage of collective cues encapsulated in multiple videos in a cooperative manner. However, it also brings up major challenges, such as handling of drastic appearance, motion pattern, and pose variations, of foreground objects as well as indiscriminate backgrounds. Here, we present a cosegmentation framework to discover and segment out common object regions across multiple frames and multiple videos in a joint fashion. We incorporate three types of cues, i.e., intraframe saliency, interframe consistency, and across-video similarity into an energy optimization framework that does not make restrictive assumptions on foreground appearance and motion model, and does not require objects to be visible in all frames. We also introduce a spatio-temporal scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) flow descriptor to integrate across-video correspondence from the conventional SIFT-flow into interframe motion flow from optical flow. This novel spatio-temporal SIFT flow generates reliable estimations of common foregrounds over the entire video data set. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on a new extensive data set (ViCoSeg). We present an unsupervised approach that generates a diverse, ranked set of bounding box and segmentation video object proposals—spatio-temporal tubes that localize the foreground objects—in an unannotated video. In contrast to previous unsupervised methods that either track regions initialized in an arbitrary frame or train a fixed model over a cluster of regions, we instead discover a set of easy-togroup instances of an object and then iteratively update its appearance model to gradually detect harder instances in temporally-adjacent frames. Our method first generates a set of spatio-temporal bounding box proposals, and then refines them to obtain pixel-wise segmentation proposals. We demonstrate state-of-the-art segmentation results on the SegTrack v2 dataset, and bounding box tracking results that perform competitively to state-of-the-art supervised tracking methods. We introduce an unsupervised, geodesic distance based, salient video object segmentation method. Unlike traditional methods, our method incorporates saliency as prior for object via the computation of robust geodesic measurement. We consider two discriminative visual features: spatial edges and temporal motion boundaries as indicators of foreground object locations. We first generate framewise spatiotemporal saliency maps using geodesic distance from these indicators. Building on the observation that foreground areas are surrounded by the regions with high spatiotemporal edge values, geodesic distance provides an initial estimation for foreground and background. Then, high-quality saliency results are produced via the geodesic distances to background regions in the subsequent frames. Through the resulting saliency maps, we build global appearance models for foreground and background. By imposing motion continuity, we establish a dynamic location model for each frame. Finally, the spatiotemporal saliency maps, appearance models and dynamic location models are combined into an energy minimization framework to attain both spatially and temporally coherent object segmentation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on benchmark video dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art algorithms. We segment moving objects in videos by ranking spatio-temporal segment proposals according to "moving objectness": how likely they are to contain a moving object. In each video frame, we compute segment proposals using multiple figure-ground segmentations on per frame motion boundaries. We rank them with a Moving Objectness Detector trained on image and motion fields to detect moving objects and discard over under segmentations or background parts of the scene. We extend the top ranked segments into spatio-temporal tubes using random walkers on motion affinities of dense point trajectories. Our final tube ranking consistently outperforms previous segmentation methods in the two largest video segmentation benchmarks currently available, for any number of proposals. Further, our per frame moving object proposals increase the detection rate up to 7 over previous state-of-the-art static proposal methods.  In this paper, we show that large annotated data sets have great potential to provide strong priors for saliency estimation rather than merely serving for benchmark evaluations. To this end, we present a novel image saliency detection method called saliency transfer. Given an input image, we first retrieve a support set of best matches from the large database of saliency annotated images. Then, we assign the transitional saliency scores by warping the support set annotations onto the input image according to computed dense correspondences. To incorporate context, we employ two complementary correspondence strategies: a global matching scheme based on scene-level analysis and a local matching scheme based on patch-level inference. We then introduce two refinement measures to further refine the saliency maps and apply the random-walk-with-restart by exploring the global saliency structure to estimate the affinity between foreground and background assignments. Extensive experimental results on four publicly available benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed saliency algorithm consistently outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we address the problem of video object segmentation, which is to automatically identify the primary object and segment the object out in every frame. We propose a novel formulation of selecting object region candidates simultaneously in all frames as finding a maximum weight clique in a weighted region graph. The selected regions are expected to have high objectness score (unary potential) as well as share similar appearance (binary potential). Since both unary and binary potentials are unreliable, we introduce two types of mutex (mutual exclusion) constraints on regions in the same clique: intra-frame and inter-frame constraints. Both types of constraints are expressed in a single quadratic form. We propose a novel algorithm to compute the maximal weight cliques that satisfy the constraints. We apply our method to challenging benchmark videos and obtain very competitive results that outperform state-of-the-art methods. We present a technique for separating foreground objects from the background in a video. Our method is fast, fully automatic, and makes minimal assumptions about the video. This enables handling essentially unconstrained settings, including rapidly moving background, arbitrary object motion and appearance, and non-rigid deformations and articulations. In experiments on two datasets containing over 1400 video shots, our method outperforms a state-of-the-art background subtraction technique [4] as well as methods based on clustering point tracks [6, 18, 19]. Moreover, it performs comparably to recent video object segmentation methods based on object proposals [14, 16, 27], while being orders of magnitude faster. Our goal is to segment a video sequence into moving objects and the world scene. In recent work, spectral embedding of point trajectories based on 2D motion cues accumulated from their lifespans, has shown to outperform factorization and per frame segmentation methods for video segmentation. The scale and kinematic nature of the moving objects and the background scene determine how close or far apart trajectories are placed in the spectral embedding. Such density variations may confuse clustering algorithms, causing over-fragmentation of object interiors. Therefore, instead of clustering in the spectral embedding, we propose detecting discontinuities of embedding density between spatially neighboring trajectories. Detected discontinuities are strong indicators of object boundaries and thus valuable for video segmentation. We propose a novel embedding discretization process that recovers from over-fragmentations by merging clusters according to discontinuity evidence along inter-cluster boundaries. For segmenting articulated objects, we combine motion grouping cues with a center-surround saliency operation, resulting in “context-aware”, spatially coherent, saliency maps. Figure-ground segmentation obtained from saliency thresholding, provides object connectedness constraints that alter motion based trajectory affinities, by keeping articulated parts together and separating disconnected in time objects. Finally, we introduce Gabriel graphs as effective per frame superpixel maps for converting trajectory clustering to dense image segmentation. Gabriel edges bridge large contour gaps via geometric reasoning without over-segmenting coherent image regions. We present experimental results of our method that outperform the state-of-the-art in challenging motion segmentation datasets. We present an approach to discover and segment foreground object(s) in video. Given an unannotated video sequence, the method first identifies object-like regions in any frame according to both static and dynamic cues. We then compute a series of binary partitions among those candidate “key-segments” to discover hypothesis groups with persistent appearance and motion. Finally, using each ranked hypothesis in turn, we estimate a pixel-level object labeling across all frames, where (a) the foreground likelihood depends on both the hypothesis's appearance as well as a novel localization prior based on partial shape matching, and (b) the background likelihood depends on cues pulled from the key-segments' (possibly diverse) surroundings observed across the sequence. Compared to existing methods, our approach automatically focuses on the persistent foreground regions of interest while resisting oversegmentation. We apply our method to challenging benchmark videos, and show competitive or better results than the state-of-the-art.  Unsupervised learning requires a grouping step that defines which data belong together. A natural way of grouping in images is the segmentation of objects or parts of objects. While pure bottom-up segmentation from static cues is well known to be ambiguous at the object level, the story changes as soon as objects move. In this paper, we present a method that uses long term point trajectories based on dense optical flow. Defining pair-wise distances between these trajectories allows to cluster them, which results in temporally consistent segmentations of moving objects in a video shot. In contrast to multi-body factorization, points and even whole objects may appear or disappear during the shot. We provide a benchmark dataset and an evaluation method for this so far uncovered setting. The use of video segmentation as an early processing step in video analysis lags behind the use of image segmentation for image analysis, despite many available video segmentation methods. A major reason for this lag is simply that videos are an order of magnitude bigger than images; yet most methods require all voxels in the video to be loaded into memory, which is clearly prohibitive for even medium length videos. We address this limitation by proposing an approximation framework for streaming hierarchical video segmentation motivated by data stream algorithms: each video frame is processed only once and does not change the segmentation of previous frames. We implement the graph-based hierarchical segmentation method within our streaming framework; our method is the first streaming hierarchical video segmentation method proposed. We perform thorough experimental analysis on a benchmark video data set and longer videos. Our results indicate the graph-based streaming hierarchical method outperforms other streaming video segmentation methods and performs nearly as well as the full-video hierarchical graph-based method. We address the problem of Foreground Background segmentation of “unconstrained” video. By “unconstrained” we mean that the moving objects and the background scene may be highly non-rigid (e.g., waves in the sea); the camera may undergo a complex motion with 3D parallax; moving objects may suffer from motion blur, large scale and illumination changes, etc. Most existing segmentation methods fail on such unconstrained videos, especially in the presence of highly non-rigid motion and low resolution. We propose a computationally efficient algorithm which is able to produce accurate results on a large variety of unconstrained videos. This is obtained by casting the video segmentation problem as a voting scheme on the graph of similar (‘re-occurring’) regions in the video sequence. We start from crude saliency votes at each pixel, and iteratively correct those votes by ‘consensus voting’ of re-occurring regions across the video sequence. The power of our consensus voting comes from the non-locality of the region re-occurrence, both in space and in time – enabling propagation of diverse and rich information across the entire video sequence. Qualitative and quantitative experiments indicate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to extract primary object segments in videos in the object proposal' domain. The extracted primary object regions are then used to build object models for optimized video segmentation. The proposed approach has several contributions: First, a novel layered Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based framework is presented for detection and segmentation of the primary object in video. We exploit the fact that, in general, objects are spatially cohesive and characterized by locally smooth motion trajectories, to extract the primary object from the set of all available proposals based on motion, appearance and predicted-shape similarity across frames. Second, the DAG is initialized with an enhanced object proposal set where motion based proposal predictions (from adjacent frames) are used to expand the set of object proposals for a particular frame. Last, the paper presents a motion scoring function for selection of object proposals that emphasizes high optical flow gradients at proposal boundaries to discriminate between moving objects and the background. The proposed approach is evaluated using several challenging benchmark videos and it outperforms both unsupervised and supervised state-of-the-art methods.