Crab Region Extraction Method from Tidal Flat Images Using Superpixels

Tidal Flats are very important natural resource and various efforts have been made to protect it from environmental pollutions. The projects to monitor the environmental changes by periodically observing the creatures in tidal flats are underway. However, they are being done inefficiently by people directly observing. In this paper, we propose an object segmentation method that can be applied to the applications which automatically monitor the living creatures in tidal flats. In the proposed method, a foreground map representing the location of objects is obtained by using a temporal difference method, and then a superpixel method is applied to detect the detailed boundary of an object. The region of a crab is extracted finally by combining the foreground map and the superpixel information. Experimental results show that the proposed method separates crab regions from a tidal flat image easily and accurately.