Contour simplification and motion compensation for very low bit-rate video coding

In order to solve the bottleneck problem of region-based coding scheme, which is the contour coding, lossy methods are introduced in this paper for both 2D and 3D (2D plus time) contour image(s). A non-linear filter by means of majority operations is designed to act as contour simplification for both pre-processing and post-processing of contour coding. A 20% gain in contour coding is achieved by applying this filter while the contour location error is within one pixel width. Afterwards, an efficient contour motion estimation and compensation coding method is presented. A fast full search motion estimation algorithm is also described, which is 2R times faster than traditional method (R is the region number). Experimental results have demonstrated outstanding performance for very low bit rate video coding