Spatio-temporal segmentation of image sequences for object-oriented low bit-rate image coding

This paper describes a new method of segmentation of time-varying image sequences whose goal is object-oriented image coding. The segmentation represents a partition of each frame of the sequence into a set of regions which are homogeneous with regard to motion criterion, The region borders correspond to spatial contours of objects in the frame. Each spatio-temporal region is characterized by its temporal component, which is a model-dependent vector of motion parameters, and a structural component representing the polygonal approximation of the spatial contour of the region. The construction of spatio-temporal segmentation includes two phases: the initialization step and temporal tracking. The initialization step is based on the spatial segmentation of the first frame of the sequence. Then homogeneous spatial regions are merged through motion estimation in accordance with a motion-based criterion. The temporal tracking consists of the projection of the segmentation along the time axis, and its adjustment. Special attention is paid to the processing of occlusions. A predictive coding scheme is proposed which is based on the temporal coherence of the segmentation. This scheme is promising for a low bit-rate image compression. The results for teleconference and TV sequences show the high visual quality of reconstructed only by prediction images. Moreover, the bit-rates for motion coding are very low: from 0.002 to 0.007 bit/pixel for teleconference sequence and from 0.004 to 0.021 bit/pixel for complex TV sequence. A scheme for encoding of the structural information is proposed which requires 0.083-0.17 bit per pixel depending on the content of the sequence.