Shape-based retrieval of video objects

The increasing availability of object-based video content requires new technologies for automatically extracting and matching of the low level features of arbitrarily shaped video. This paper proposes methods for shape retrieval of arbitrarily shaped video objects. Our methods take into account not only the still shape features but also the shape deformations that may occur in an object's lifespan. We compute the shape similarity of video objects by comparing the similarity of their representative temporal instances. We also describe motion of a video object via describing the deformations in an object's shape. Experimental results show that our proposed methods offer very good retrieval performance and match closely with the human ranking.