Video Object Tracking with Feedback of Performance Measures

The task of segmentation and tracking of objects in a video sequence is an important high-level video processing problem for object-based video manipulation and representation. This task involves utilization of many low-level pre-processing tasks such as image segmentation and motion estimation. It is also very important to assess the performance of the video object segmentation and tracking algorithms quantitatively and objectively. Performance evaluation measures are proposed both when the ground-truth segmentation maps are available and when they are unavailable. A semi-automatic video object tracking method is introduced that uses the proposed performance evaluation measures in a feedback loop to adjust its parameters locally on the object boundary. New low-level image segmentation and motion estimation algorithms, namely, an illumination invariant fuzzy image segmentation algorithm and a motion estimation estimation algorithm in the frequency domain using fuzzy c-planes clustering are also presented in this thesis.