Title
Automatic foreground extraction from imperfect backgrounds using multi-agent consensus equilibrium
Abstract
Extracting accurate foreground objects from a scene is an essential step for many video applications. Traditional background subtraction algorithms can generate coarse estimates, but generating high quality masks requires professional softwares with significant human interventions, e.g., providing trimaps or labeling key frames. We propose an automatic foreground extraction method in applications where a static but imperfect background is available. Examples include filming and surveillance where the background can be captured before the objects enter the scene or after they leave the scene. Our proposed method is very robust and produces significantly better estimates than state-of-the-art background subtraction, video segmentation and alpha matting methods. The key innovation of our method is a novel information fusion technique. The fusion framework allows us to integrate the individual strengths of alpha matting, background subtraction and image denoising to produce an overall better estimate. Such integration is particularly important when handling complex scenes with imperfect background. We show how the framework is developed, and how the individual components are built. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted to evaluate the proposed method.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1016/j.jvcir.2020.102907
Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation
Keywords
DocType
Volume
41A05,41A10,65D05,65D17
Journal
72
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1047-3203
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiran Wang100.34
Jason Juang2251.77
Stanley H. Chan340330.95