Object-oriented video coding algorithm for very low bit-rate system

Abstract

In this paper, a video coding method based on region segmentation is proposed. It is designed for very low bit-rate systems such as video-phone and video-conferencing. Instead of block-based coding, we adopt an object-oriented approach, which first calculates the motion vector of each pixel using a modified optical flow approach, then segments the motion field into circumscribed rectangular regions that can be efficiently coded. Simulation results of several typical image sequences reveal that the proposed algorithm is both effective and of high performance.