New techniques on deformed image motion estimation and compensation

In this paper, new techniques for deformed image motion estimation and compensation using variable-size block-matching are proposed, which can be applied to an image sequence compression system or a moving object recognition system. The motion estimation and compensation techniques have been successfully applied in the area of image sequence coding. Many research papers on improving the performance of these techniques have been published; many directions are proposed, which can all lead to better performance than the conventional techniques. Among them, both generalized block-matching and variable-size block-matching are successfully applied in reducing the data rate of compensation error and motion information, respectively. These two algorithms have their merits, but suffer from their drawbacks. Moreover, reducing the data rate in compensation error is sometimes increasing the data rate in motion information, or vice versa. Based on these two algorithms, we propose and examine several algorithms which are effective in reducing the data rate. We then incorporate these algorithms into a system, in which they work together to overcome the disadvantages to individual and keep their merits at the same time. The proposed system can optimally balance the amount of data rate in two aspects (i.e., compensation error and motion information). Experimental results show that the proposed system outweighs the conventional techniques. Since we propose a recovery operation which tries to recover the incorrect motion vectors from the global motion, this proposed system can also be applied to the moving object recognition in image sequences.