Extraction of foreground objects from a MPEG2 video stream in rough indexing framework

In the domain of video indexing, one of the research topics is the automatic extraction of information to reach the objective of automatically describing and organizing the content. Thinking of a video stream, different kinds of information can be taken into account, but we can suppose that most of the information is contained in the foreground objects so that number of objects, their shape, their contours and so on, can constitute a good guess for the content description. This paper describes a new approach to extract foreground objects in MPEG2 video stream, in the framework of rough indexing paradigm we define. This paradigm leads us to reach the purpose in near real time, nevertheless maintaining a good level of details.