  Pixels operate locally. Superpixels have some potential to collect
information across many pixels; supervoxels have more potential by implicitly
operating across time. In this paper, we explore this well established notion
thoroughly analyzing how supervoxels can be used in place of and in conjunction
with other means of aggregating information across space-time. Focusing on the
problem of strictly unsupervised video object segmentation, we devise a method
called supervoxel gerrymandering that links masks of foregroundness and
backgroundness via local and non-local consensus measures. We pose and answer a
series of critical questions about the ability of supervoxels to adequately
sway local voting; the questions regard type and scale of supervoxels as well
as local versus non-local consensus, and the questions are posed in a general
way so as to impact the broader knowledge of the use of supervoxels in video
understanding. We work with the DAVIS dataset and find that our analysis yields
an unsupervised method that outperforms all other known unsupervised methods
and even many supervised ones.
