A fast and high subjective quality sprite generation algorithm with frame skipping and multiple sprites techniques

Sprite coding, which is a new coding tool in MPEG-4, can achieve high coding efficiency with high subjective quality at low bit rate. Many sprite generation algorithms have been proposed; however, the computational intensity is very high and the quality is not good enough because of the limitation of simple motion models. A novel sprite generation algorithm is proposed with several new techniques. A frame skipping technique can generate the sprite using only several important frames to accelerate the process and achieve similar subjective quality. In addition, boundary matching and multiple sprites techniques can overcome the limitation of simple motion models to achieve high subjective quality with little computation overhead. Experiments show the proposed algorithm is 46 times faster than the algorithms in MPEG-4 VM and have high subjective quality. These techniques can be also applied with other sprite generation algorithms.