A Video Segmentation Toolbox with Support for User Interaction

Video segmentation assumes an important role in many object-based video applications, such as those enabled by the recent MPEG-4 standard for coding audiovisual objects, or by the upcoming MPEG-7 standard for multimedia content description. This paper presents a video segmentation toolbox, giving emphasis to the graphical user interface and to the support for user interaction. Two types of user interaction tools have been included: initial user interaction and segmentation refinement interaction. The first is mainly used to introduce basic semantic information to guide the segmentation, e.g. the number of objects, while the second allows correcting deviations of the automatically produced segmentation results regarding the desired ones. In this paper, the toolbox architecture is presented and after the user interaction segmentation tools are described along with several segmentation examples illustrating the relevance of the user interaction role. I