Any intelligent masking tools?

Hi,

I have 2 questions:

1) I have Matt's older VHS series on Commotion. In which tape can I find a description of applying motion tracking to spline verices, as was mentioned by someone in the post concerning roto-ing a hat out?

2) I'd also like to ask a broader but related question. Are there still no softwares/tools to partially automate hand roto-ing using some kind of built-in intelligence? E.g. in many cases it may not be possible to key at all because of a busy background but it may be possible to motion-track a few important points on the subject. If I could then use the trackers on individual spline vertices, then a large part of the mask animation could be automated, leaving only fine-tuning to be done. If not in Commotion, can some other software do this - e.g. Combustion?

Similarly, there could be a software which makes rotosplines "snap" intelligently to the edges of the subject using local contrast once you draw a loose approx garbage mask around the subject (I believe Automasker tried to do this when it was available, but wasn't very good; Motionkey).

Or, better still, some kind of intelligent pattern recognition based software could try to identify objects "semantically" and extract them (hordes of research papers on Univ sites claiming they have successfully done this using human vision models - humans can just look at a picture as a whole and know where the outlines of the subject are). Or, something like what matrix metering does in cameras by cataloguing thousands of typical scenes and then guessing a correct format when applying this database to real life data.

Any way to automate roto-work would make so much more footage eligible for extraction of subject / actions. Any pointers anyone?