Human Extraction and Scene Transition utilizing Mask R-CNN

TL;DR

This paper presents a method using Mask R-CNN to extract multiple persons from images and videos, enabling background replacement and scene composition to enhance quality of life and social connection.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel application of Mask R-CNN for selective person extraction and background replacement, supporting multiple targets and real-time processing without additional overhead.

Findings

Effective extraction of persons in images and videos

Supports multiple person selection and background replacement

Operates at 5 fps without extra computational cost

Abstract

Object detection is a trendy branch of computer vision, especially on human recognition and pedestrian detection. Recognizing the complete body of a person has always been a difficult problem. Over the years, researchers proposed various methods, and recently, Mask R-CNN has made a breakthrough for instance segmentation. Based on Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN has been able to generate a segmentation mask for each instance. We propose an application to extracts multiple persons from images and videos for pleasant life scenes to grouping happy moments of people such as family or friends and a community for QOL (Quality Of Life). We likewise propose a methodology to put extracted images of persons into the new background. This enables a user to make a pleasant collection of happy facial expressions and actions of his/her family and friends in his/her life. Mask R-CNN detects all types of object masks from images. Then our algorithm considers only the target person and extracts a person only without obstacles, such as dogs in front of the person, and the user also can select multiple persons as their expectations. Our algorithm is effective for both an image and a video irrespective of the length of it. Our algorithm does not add any overhead to Mask R-CNN, running at 5 fps. We show examples of yoga-person in an image and a dancer in a dance-video frame. We hope our simple and effective approach would serve as a baseline for replacing the image background and help ease future research.