Texture as pixel feature for video object segmentation

As texture represents one of the key perceptual attributes of any object, integrating textural information into existing video object segmentation frameworks affords the potential to achieve semantically improved performance. While object segmentation is fundamentally pixel-based classification, texture is normally defined for the entire image, which raises the question of how best to directly specify and characterise texture as a pixel feature. Introduced is a generic strategy for representing textural information so it can be seamlessly incorporated as a pixel feature into any video object segmentation paradigm. Both numerical and perceptual results upon various test sequences reveal considerable improvement in the object segmentation performance when textural information is embedded.