Very low bit-rate video coding using multi-criterion segmentation

A region-based segmentation algorithm by multi-criterion for image sequence coding is described in this paper. It is based on morphological segmentation and motion compensation techniques. The concept of multicriterion is introduced into the traditional morphological segmentation process, which takes into account the high temporal redundancy. The current image is segmented into two different kinds of regions: homogeneous gray-level regions coded by texture modeling method or homogeneous motion regions represented by motion compensation. No prediction error needs to be transmitted. Contours are simplified by a new nonlinear filter. Experimental results have demonstrated outstanding performance, with the combination power of contour-texture approach and the motion compensation technique, for very low bitrate image sequence coding