Motion segmentation of RGB-D sequences: Combining semantic and motion information using statistical inference

This paper presents an innovative method for motion segmentation in RGB-D dynamic videos with multiple moving objects. The focus is on finding static, small or slow moving objects (often overlooked by other methods) that their inclusion can improve the motion segmentation results. In our approach, semantic object based segmentation and motion cues are combined to estimate the number of moving objects, their motion parameters and perform segmentation. Selective object-based sampling and correspondence matching are used to estimate object specific motion parameters. The main issue with such an approach is the over segmentation of moving parts due to the fact that different objects can have the same motion (e.g. background objects). To resolve this issue, we propose to identify objects with similar motions by characterizing each motion by a distribution of a simple metric and using a statistical inference theory to assess their similarities. To demonstrate the significance of the proposed statistical inference, we present an ablation study, with and without static objects inclusion, on SLAM accuracy using the TUM-RGBD dataset. To test the effectiveness of the proposed method for finding small or slow moving objects, we applied the method to RGB-D MultiBody and SBM-RGBD motion segmentation datasets. The results showed that we can improve the accuracy of motion segmentation for small objects while remaining competitive on overall measures.