Motion-Compensated Television Coding: Part I

We present methods of estimating displacements of moving objects from one frame to the next in a television scene and using such displacements for frame-to-frame prediction. Displacement is estimated by a recursive algorithm which seeks to minimize a functional of the prediction error. Several simplifications of the algorithm are presented which make it attractive for hardware implementation. Performance of the algorithm is evaluated by computer simulations on two sequences of moving images containing various amounts and types of motion. In both cases, the use of displacement-based (or motion-compensated) prediction results in bit rates that are 22 to 50 percent lower than those obtained by simple “frame-difference” prediction, which is used commonly in the interframe coders.