A NEW ARCHITECTURE FOR MOTION-COMPENSATED IMAGE-CODING

In motion-compensated image coding (MCIC), the block matching algorithm requires a very complex computational procedure. To overcome this problem, several fast search procedures have been proposed. However, the resultant errors for these procedures may be too large unless small displacement is assumed. In order to reduce the computational complexity and preserve the quality of the original image, a new architecture for MCIC without the small displacement assumption is proposed in this paper. Based on a so-called characteristic mapping, certain important features of the block will be extracted and matched in the space of features. Hence, the procedure of matching any two blocks is very much simplified and the time required is drastically reduced. Moreover, the simulation results indicate that its performance is superior to those fast search procedures based on the error between the reconstructed image and the original one. This property will result in low bit rates for transmitting the error frame.