Image segmentation provides a powerful semantic description of video imagery essential in image understanding and efficient manipulation of image data. In particular, segmentation based on image motion defines regions undergoing similar motion allowing image coding system to more efficiently represent video sequences. This paper describes a general iterative framework for segmentation of video data . The objective of our spatiotemporal segmentation is to produce a layered image representation of the video for image coding applications whereby video data is simply described as a set of moving layers.