New techniques for multi-resolution motion estimation

We investigate three new methods to predict motion vectors (MVs) across subbands for multi-resolution motion estimation (MRME): linear prediction, median filtering (MF), and multi-candidate techniques. Compared to the conventional MRME techniques, the proposed linear-prediction-based and the MF-based techniques effectively overcome the problem of propagation of false MVs. A significant feature of these two techniques is that they impose no demand for additional bandwidth, and simulation studies show that they not only improve prediction performance, but also reduce the number of bits needed to encode the motion information. It is further shown that the improvement in the performance thus achieved involves little increase in computational complexity.