  Segmentation of an object from a video is a challenging task in multimedia
applications. Depending on the application, automatic or interactive methods
are desired; however, regardless of the application type, efficient computation
of video object segmentation is crucial for time-critical applications;
specifically, mobile and interactive applications require near real-time
efficiencies. In this paper, we address the problem of video segmentation from
the perspective of efficiency. We initially redefine the problem of video
object segmentation as the propagation of MRF energies along the temporal
domain. For this purpose, a novel and efficient method is proposed to propagate
MRF energies throughout the frames via bilateral filters without using any
global texture, color or shape model. Recently presented bi-exponential filter
is utilized for efficiency, whereas a novel technique is also developed to
dynamically solve graph-cuts for varying, non-lattice graphs in general linear
filtering scenario. These improvements are experimented for both automatic and
interactive video segmentation scenarios. Moreover, in addition to the
efficiency, segmentation quality is also tested both quantitatively and
qualitatively. Indeed, for some challenging examples, significant time
efficiency is observed without loss of segmentation quality.
