An interactive approach to pose-assisted and appearance-based segmentation of humans

An interactive human segmentation approach is described. Given regions of interest provided by users, the approach iteratively estimates segmentation via a generalized EM algorithm. Specifically, it encodes both spatial and color information in a nonparametric kernel density estimator, and incorporates local MRF constraints and global pose inferences to propagate beliefs over image space iteratively to determine a coherent segmentation. This ensures the segmented humans resemble the shapes of human poses. Additionally, a layered occlusion model and a probabilistic occlusion reasoning method are proposed to handle segmentation of multiple humans in occlusion. The approach is tested on a wide variety of images containing single or multiple occluded humans, and the segmentation performance is evaluated quantitatively.