A grey scale morphological approach for displaced frame difference coding

In image sequence compression schemes based on motion compensation, some new information contained in the displaced frame difference image must be coded. As this is expensive to transmit, it is important, particularly at low bit rates, to code only the most important information. We propose a segmentation algorithm based on morphological operations to extract the visually important regions of the displaced frame difference image. This segmentation is combined with a coding scheme which is automatically optimized for a given bit rate constraint. As demonstrated by examples, this method is well adapted to low resolution (QCIF format) sequences