Segmentation and motion estimation of moving objects for object-oriented analysis-synthesis coding

This paper presents a segmentation and motion estimation method for object-oriented analysis-synthesis coding. A major difficulty in estimating general motion is that it requires a large area of support in order to achieve a good estimation. Unfortunately, when the supporting area is large it is very likely to have multiple moving objects. To solve this problem, we propose a multi-stage segmentation method which is based on optical flow. The basic concept is to group homogeneous subregions with respect to simpler mapping model into large homogeneous regions with respect to more complex mapping model. By applying a hierarchy of mapping parameter model progressively, we can segment the whole changed region into several parabolic patches. Especially person's face in head-and-shoulder images can be described as one object.