For Motion Picture Special Effects, it is often necessary to take a source image of an actor, segment the actor from the unwanted background, and then composite over a new background. The resultant image appears as if the actor was filmed in front of the new background. The standard approach requires the unwanted background to be a blue or green screen. While this technique is capable of handling areas where the foreground (the actor) blends into the background, the physical requirements present many practical problems. This thesis investigates the possibility of segmenting images where the unwanted background is more varied. Standard segmentation techniques tend not to be effective, since motion picture images have extremely high resolution and high accuracy is required to make the result appear convincing. A set of novel algorithms which require minimal human interaction to initialise the processing is presented. These algorithms classify each pixel by comparing its colour to that of known background and foreground areas. They are shown to be effective where there is a sufficient distinction between the colours of the foreground and background. A technique for assessing the quality of an image segmentation in order to compare these algorithms to alternative solutions is presented. Results are included which suggest that in most cases the novel algorithms have the best performance, and that they produce results more quickly than the alternative approaches. Techniques for segmentation of moving images sequences are then presented. Results are included which show that only a few frames of the sequence need to be initialised by hand, as it is often possible to generate automatically the input required to initialise processing for the remaining frames. A novel algorithm which can produce acceptable results on image sequences where more conventional approaches fail or are too slow to be of use is presented.