Clausius Normalized Field-Based Shape-Independent Motion Segmentation

Abstract

SUMMARYWe propose a novel motion segmentation method based on a Clausius Normalized Field (CNF), a probabilistic model for treating time-varying imagery, which estimates entropy variations by observing the entropy definitions of Clausius and Boltzmann. As pixels of an image are viewed as a state of lattice-like molecules in a thermodynamic system, estimating entropy variations of pixels is the same as estimating their degrees of disorder. A greater increase in entropy means that a pixel has a higher chance of belonging to moving objects rather than to the background, because of its higher disorder. In addition to these homologous operations, a CNF naturally takes into consideration both spatial and temporal information to avoid local maxima, which substantially improves the accuracy of motion segmentation. Our motion segmentation system using CNF clearly separates moving objects from their backgrounds. It also effectively eliminates noise to a level achieved when refined post-processing steps are applied to the results of general motion segmentations. It requires less computational power than other random fields and generates automatically normalized outputs without additional post-processes.