Multiscale motion estimation for scalable video coding
R. Krishnamurthy, Pierre Moulin, John W. Woods · 2002
Motion estimation is an important component of video coding systems because it enables us to exploit the temporal redundancy in the sequence. The popular block-matching algorithms (BMAs) produce unnatural, piecewise constant motion fields that do not correspond to "true" motion. In contrast, our focus here is on high-quality motion estimates that produce a video representation that is less dependent on the specific frame-rate or resolution. To this end, we present an iterated registration algorithm that extends previous work on multiscale motion models and gradient-based estimation for coding applications. We obtain improved motion estimates and higher overall coding performance. Promising applications are found in temporally-scalable video coding with motion-compensated frame interpolation at the decoder. We obtain excellent interpolation performance and video quality; in contrast, BMA leads to annoying artifacts near moving image edges.