Object removal from complex videos using a few annotations

We present a system for the removal of objects from videos. As input, the system only needs a user to draw a few strokes on the first frame, roughly delimiting the objects to be removed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system allowing the semi-automatic removal of objects from videos with complex backgrounds. The key steps of our system are the following: after initialization, segmentation masks are first refined and then automatically propagated through the video. Missing regions are then synthesized using video inpainting techniques. Our system can deal with multiple, possibly crossing objects, with complex motions, and with dynamic textures. This results in a computational tool that can alleviate tedious manual operations for editing high-quality videos.