Classifier based graph construction for video segmentation

Video segmentation has become an important and active research area with a large diversity of pro-posed approaches. Graph-based methods, enabling top-performance on recent benchmarks, consist of three essen-tial components: 1. powerful features account for object ap-pearance and motion similarities; 2. spatio-temporal neigh-borhoods of pixels or superpixels (the graph edges) are modeled using a combination of those features; 3. video segmentation is formulated as a graph partitioning prob-lem. While a wide variety of features have been explored and various graph partition algorithms have been pro-posed, there is surprisingly little research on how to con-struct a graph to obtain the best video segmentation perfor-mance. This is the focus of our paper. We propose to com-bine features by means of a classifier, use calibrated classi-fier outputs as edge weights and define the graph topology by edge selection. By learning the graph (without changes to the graph partitioning method), we improve the results of the best performing video segmentation algorithm by 6% on the challenging VSB100 benchmark, while reducing its runtime by 55%, as the learnt graph is much sparser