This thesis addresses the field of early stage video preprocessing in order to improve and accelerate subsequent processing steps like semantic video segmentation or video-based object tracking. A framework is proposed to segment video streams into temporally consistent superpixels in order to create a representation of the video with far less image primitives than the voxelgrid. The proposed energy-minimization-based approach utilizes a novel hybrid clustering strategy for a multidimensional feature space. Techniques are presented to ensure the consistency of the superpixel flow with the image movement while considering visual occlusion and disocclusion
effects. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by a comparison to state-of-theart spatio-temporal oversegmentation algorithms using established benchmark metrics. Additionally, its effectiveness is further demonstrated by showing its application on the real-world scenario of interactive video segmentation.
