1. David Harwin Adviser: Petros Faloutsos
Background Removal
David Harwin
Adviser: Petros Faloutsos

2. The State of the Art
This field has been one of great interest in the past decade
There have been many recent papers on the topic with intended applications ranging from visual effects processing to ...
In order to determine how to proceed, I have spent the quarter reading and analyzing existing papers.

3. Identifying motion pixel differencing vs optical flow
differencing vulnerable to signal noise, illumination changes, and BG motion
optical flow is computationally expensive
most opted for hybrid approach
only Criminisi (2006) avoids optical flow altogether, and instead uses spatio-temporal continuity of labels

4. Segmentation 2-pass approach
low-level then high-level (Calderara, Tsai, Ćalić)‏
Calderara - 2nd pass checks for consistency of changes in color and intensity over time. Objects with insufficiently coherent motion are ignored as BG
Tsai – 1st pass initial labelling (constantly vs never changing), 2nd only works on uncertain pixels
Ćalić - creates low-resolution representation, corrects BG for camera motion through matrix transformations, determines most ”salient” frames, then calculation of regions of interest occurs only on these keyframes
high-level then low-level (Park)‏
Park - object tracking, followed by pixel differencing inside the object window
Single pass
Criminisi -

5. Key Features