POD: Discovering primary objects in videos based on evolutionary refinement of object recurrence, background, and primary object models

A primary object discovery (POD) algorithm for a video sequence is proposed in this work, which is capable of discovering a primary object, as well as identifying noisy frames that do not contain the object. First, we generate object proposals for each frame. Then, we bisect each proposal into foreground and background regions, and extract features from each region. By superposing the foreground and background features, we build the object recurrence model, the background model, and the primary object model. We develop an iterative scheme to refine each model evolutionarily using the information in the other models. Finally, using the evolved primary object model, we select candidate proposals and locate the bounding box of a primary object by merging the proposals selectively. Experimental results on a challenging dataset demonstrate that the proposed POD algorithm extracts primary objects accurately and robustly.