Object-oriented video coding employing dense motion fields

This paper focuses on object-oriented motion estimation and motion field encoding for video compression. A dense motion field and its segmentation are estimated jointly by a MAP estimator. The a priori distribution of the estimates is modelled by a coupled Markov random field accounting for both spatial smoothness and temporal continuity along motion trajectories of the estimates. A lossy contour/content code is proposed for motion field transmission. For each object, a region-oriented linear transform is applied to the motion vectors. It minimizes a distortion measure which approximates the square error of motion compensated prediction. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the scheme for video encoding with high compression ratio