An Image Segmentation Technique For Very Low Bit Rate Video Coding

This paper describes an image segmentation technique for the object-oriented coding at very low bit rates. By noting that, in the object-oriented coding technique, each objects are represented by 3 parameters, namely, shape, motion, and color informations, we propose a segmentation technique, in which the 3 parameters are fully exploited. To achieve this goal, starting with the color space conversion and the noise reduction, the input image is divided into many small regions by the K-menas algorithm on the O-K-S color space. Then, each regions are merged, according to the shape and motion information. In simultations, it is shown that the proposed technique segments the input image into relevant objects, according to the shape and motion as well as the colors. In addition, in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique, we introduce the notion of the interesting regions, and provide the results of encoding the image with emphasizing the interesting regions.