Segmentation-based motion-compensated video coding using morphological filters

The number of regions and length of contour are two basic constraints in segmentation-based motion-compensated video coding. This paper presents a coding scheme which focuses on region number reduction, contour coding, and displaced frame difference (DFD) compression. One of the important features of the proposed scheme is a spatio-temporal simplification algorithm based on morphological filters, with which an image can be segmented into a small number of regions. Another important feature of the scheme is a segmentation map sampling technique which reduces contour length by about 50% with a very small reconstruction error. Experimental results show that, using the proposed scheme, a high compression ratio can be achieved with a small coding error for video sequences such as Miss America and Foreman.