Super-resolution mosaicing from MPEG compressed video

In this paper we address the problem of mosaic construction from MPEG 1/2 compressed video for the purpose of video browsing. State-of-the-art mosaicing methods work on raw video, but most video content is available in compressed form such as MPEG 1/2. Applying these methods to compressed video requires full decoding which is very costly. The resulting mosaic is in general too large to display on the screen and is thus inappropriate for the purpose of video browsing. Therefore, we directly extract very low-resolution frames from MPEG 1/2 compressed video for the mosaic construction and then apply a super-resolution (SR) method based on iterative backprojections in order to increase the mosaic resolution and its visual quality. Global motion to be used in the SR method for aligning and warping the frames is estimated from motion information contained in the compressed stream. We also use the estimated global motion in the blur estimation and in the choice of the degradation model used for the restoration in the SR algorithm. The method for the SR mosaic construction from MPEG 1/2 compressed video that we present in this paper is less costly than mosaic construction from full decoded video. Furthermore, the resulting mosaic size is more appropriate for the purpose of video browsing. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.