Unsupervised object-based sprite coding system for tennis sport

Sprite coding is a new objected-based coding technology proposed by MPEG-4 video standard. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised sprite coding system for sport videos, for example, tennis sequences. Our system can provide several important functions. First, the sprite of the background can be generated without any pre-processing masks in our system. Second, it can automatically segment the foreground and background in a video sequence. Third, it can provide the masks of the foreground objects and the tennis ball. The experimental results show that our system has a very good performance and the coding gain of our system compared with MPEG-4 advanced simple profile is 2.5 dB at the low bit rate (270 Kbps) and is 2 dB at the ultra low bit rate (70 Kbps). It can be used in the sport video coding at low bit rate and provides a object-based sport video sequence.