Superpixel Labeling Priors and MRF for Aerial Video Segmentation

Video segmentation is a task of partitioning pixels that exhibit homogeneous appearance and motion into coherent spatial–temporal groups, which is still challenging for aerial applications. In this paper, a principled combination of superpixel labeling priors and Markov random field (S-MRF) is proposed for aerial video segmentation. The proposed approach has several contributions: 1) we develop a metadata-based global projection model with coordinate transformation to estimate motion information between frames; 2) the superpixel labeling priors from previous frames are incorporated into the segmentation of the current frame, leading to a highly efficient probabilistic label propagation algorithm; and 3) we perform an MRF optimization on the initial segments with propagated labeling priors to improve the temporal coherency. In addition, a new video dataset is collected and will be made publicly available to evaluate the performance of aerial video segmentation algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art video segmentation methods.