Motion compensated video coder based on block matching method with variable-sized blocks

This study aims to improve the efficiency of the hybrid (lifting and motion compensation) video compression method by incorporating variable block size for block matching. That hybrid method first separates even and odd numbered video frames. Then the even frames are predicted using a temporal edge adapted idea, which was previously proposed for 2D image coding. To further improve the efficiency, a novel symmetric block matching pre-step is applied. This method was observed to perform well in test video sequences. In this work, to further improve the block matching representation efficiency, a variable size block idea is proposed. The new proposed method compares neighboring blocks in terms of motion vectors, and merges them to a larger size if the directions and sizes of motions are common. The proposed method yields PSNR values greater than that of MPEG2 and closer to that of H.264 in the fixed compression ratios.