Automatic Object Segmentation and Background Composition for Interactive Video Communications over Mobile Phones

This paper proposes an automatic object segmentation and background composition method for video communication over consumer mobile phones. The object regions were extracted based on the motion and color variance of the first two frames. To combine the motion and variance information, the Euclidean distance between the motion boundary pixel and the neighboring color variance edge pixels was calculated, and the nearest edge pixel was labeled to the object boundary. The labeling results were refined using the morphology for a more accurate and natural-looking boundary. The grow-cut segmentation algorithm begins in the expanded label map, where the inner and outer boundary belongs to the foreground and background, respectively. The segmented object region and a new background image stored a priori in the mobile phone was then composed. In the background composition process, the background motion was measured using the optical-flow, and the final result was synthesized by accurately locating the object region according to the motion information. This study can be considered an extended, improved version of the existing background composition algorithm by considering motion information in a video. The proposed segmentation algorithm reduces the computational complexity significantly by choosing the minimum resolution at each segmentation step. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm can generate a fast, accurate and natural-looking background composition.