Unsupervised Online Video Object Segmentation with Motion Property Understanding

Unsupervised online video object segmentation (VOS) aims to automatically segment the moving objects over an unconstrained video without the requirements of any prior information about the objects or camera motion. It is therefore a very challenging problem for high-level video analysis. So far, limited number of such methods have been reported in literature and most of them still have distance to a satisfactory performance. Targeting this challenging problem,in this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised online VOS framework by understanding the motion property as the meaning of \emph{moving} in concurrence with \emph{a generic object} for the segmented regions. By incorporating \emph{salient motion detection} and \emph{object proposal}, a pixel-wise fusion strategy is developed to effectively remove detection noises such as background movements and stationary objects. Furthermore, by leveraging the obtained segmentation from immediately preceding frames, a forward propagation algorithm is proposed to deal with the unreliable motion detection and object proposals. Experimental results on DAVIS-2016 and SegTrack-v2 benchmark dataset show that the proposed method outperforms the other state-of-the-art unsupervised online segmentation by achieving 5.6\% absolute improvement at least, and additionally even achieves a better performance than the best unsupervised offline method on DAVIS-2016 dataset. Another significant advantage also need to be addressed that in all the experiments, there is only one existing trained model for object proposal (Mask RCNN on COCO dataset) being used without any fine-tuning, which is the demonstration of robustness. The most contribution of this work might sheds light on the potential and to motivate more VOS framework studies based on characteristic motion properties.