Frame-free video

Current digital video representations emphasize compression efficiency, lacking some of the flexibility required for interactive manipulation of digital bitstreams. We present a video representation which can encompass both space and time, providing a temporally coherent description of video sequences. The video sequence is segmented into its component objects, and the trajectory of each object throughout the sequence is described parametrically, according to a spatiotemporal motion model. Since the motion model is a continuous function of time, the video representation becomes frame-rate independent and the temporal resolution a user-definable parameter. i.e. the traditional sequence of frames, with the temporal structure hardcoded into the bitstream at the time of production, is replaced by a collection of scene snapshots assembled on the fly by the decoder. This enables random access and temporal scalability, the major building blocks for interactivity