Inter mode vertex-based optimal shape coding

This paper investigates the problem of optimal lossy encoding of object contours in the inter mode. Contours are approximated by connected second-order spline segments, each defined by three consecutive control points. Taking into account correlations in the temporal direction, control points are chosen optimally in the rate-distortion sense. Applying motion to contours in the reference frame followed by the temporal context extraction, we predict the next control point location, given the previously encoded one. Based on the chosen differential encoding scheme and an additive MPEG-4 based distortion metric, the problem is formulated as Lagrangian minimization. We utilize an iterative procedure to jointly find the optimal solution and the associated DPCM parameter probability mass functions