Region-based motion estimation using deterministic relaxation schemes for image sequence coding

Motion analysis studies provide efficient estimation schemes for estimating dense optical flow fields. However, for image sequence coding where motion features have to be transmitted, an adaptive compact motion representation is required to extract temporal redundancy from an image sequence with a minimum amount of side information and, nevertheless, with a high quality of reconstruction. The advantages of region-based motion descriptions are illustrated and compared to those of the usual local ones (i.e., only two purely translational components of apparent motion). A new relaxation method for compact quantitative motion estimation using a hierarchy of motion models is presented