Motion Estimation with Similarity Constraint and Its Application to Distributed Video Coding

In this paper we present a new motion estimation scheme that constraints the matching difference function with a similarity measure in its motion search process. We exploit the motion correlation among adjacent pixel blocks with similar statistics features and formulate this correlation as a similarity measure in terms of the motion similarity between the current pixel block and the neighboring blocks weighted by their corresponding statistical similarity. We then use this similarity measure as a constraint in the matching difference function to effectively trade off the differences in the pixel intensity values with the correlation in the adjacent motion vectors. Thus the motion estimation process becomes not only to minimize the differences in the pixel values but also to weight on the motion similarity in statistically similar neighbors. We applied this new motion estimation scheme to a distributed video coding system for side information generation at the Wyner-Ziv decoder and compared its performance to the scheme with no similarity constraint. The experimental results have shown that our motion estimation scheme with the similarity constraint has achieved significant gains in the fidelity of the generated side information and the decoded Wyner-Ziv frames over the scheme with no similarity constraint.

By: Ligang Lu; Vadim Sheinin

Published in: RC24155 in 2007

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