Motion estimation for region-based video coding

Region-based video compression has been a very active research area over the last few years. It has been viewed as a potential alternative to traditional schemes suffering from the “blockiness” of image intensities at very low bit rates. We present a new approach to region-based representation and motion estimation. It is based on the observation that motion boundaries usually coincide with region boundaries. Thus, we first compute an intensity-based image partition and use it as an initial step in a 3-step algorithm: motion estimation for intensity-derived regions, motion-based region fusion and adjustment of region boundaries. We present experimental results for standard QCIF images and compare our method with block matching and dense motion field estimation. We also study the performance loss due to a lossy transmission of partition information