Motion Based Foreground Segmentation using Block Matching Algorithm (BMA)

The extraction of the moving foreground from a stationary background from a general video sequence has various applications such as compression of videos and also in the cinematographic effects. For this foreground extraction the main algorithm used is the Block Matching Algorithm (BMA) which is the motion estimation algorithm employed in the MPEG compression standards. The noise is estimated first and then using BMA the motion is estimated i.e., BMA partitions the current frame in small, fixed size blocks and matches them to the previous frame, in order to estimate blocks displacement (Referred as Motion Vectors) between two successive frames. Recursive tracing of the resulting motion vectors is done, finally to segment the required moving foreground.