Segmentation-based motion compensation for enhanced video coding

Traditional video compression is based on block-based motion estimation and compensation. However, experimental results and the latest standards have proved that adapting the size and the shape of the motion estimation area to the objects in the scene significantly improves the performance of the overall coding process. The current paper presents a new segmentation-based coding strategy that partitions the input frame into irregularly-shaped regions. These segments are then used to estimate the motion-compensated prediction in the previous frames. The scheme outperforms the rate-distortion performance of H.264/AVC of 2 dB with a reasonable increment of the encoding complexity due to segmentation.