• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.441-449
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• 2007

In video coding, motion estimation is a process to estimate the pixel of the current frame from the reference frame, which affects directly the predictive quality and the encoding time. This paper is related to AHHS(Adaptive Hierarchical Hexagon Search) using spatio-temporal motion activity for fast motion estimation. The proposed method defines the spatio-temporal motion activity of the current macroblock using the motion vectors of its spatio-temporally adjacent macroblocks, and then conventional AHS(Adaptive Hexagon Search) is performed if the spatio-temporal motion activity is lower, otherwise, hierarchical hexagon search is performed on a multi-layered hierarchical space constructed by multiple sub-images with low frequency in wavelet transform. In the paper, based on computer simulation results for multiple video sequences with different motion characteristics, the performance of the proposed method was analysed and assessed in terms of the predictive quality and the computational time. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is both suitable for (quasi-) stationary and large motion searches. The proposed method could keep the merit of the adaptive hexagon search capable of fast estimating motion vectors and also adaptively reduce the local minima occurred in the video sequences with higher spatio-temporal motion activity.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.126-133
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• 2003

This paper is related to a morphological segmentation method for extracting the moving object in video sequence using global motion compensation and two-dimensional spatio-temporal entropic thresholding. First, global motion compensation is performed with camera panning vector estimated in the hierarchical pyramid structure constructed by wavelet transform. Secondly, the regions with high possibility to include the moving object between two consecutive frames are extracted block by block from the global motion compensated image using two-dimensional spatio-temporal entropic thresholding. Afterwards, the LUT classifying each block into one among changed block, uncertain block, stationary block according to the results classified by two-dimensional spatio-temporal entropic thresholding is made out. Next, by adaptively selecting the initial search layer and the search range referring to the LUT, the proposed HBMA can effectively carry out fast motion estimation and extract object-included region in the hierarchical pyramid structure. Finally, after we define the thresholded gradient image in the object-included region, and apply the morphological segmentation method to the object-included region pixel by pixel and extract the moving object included in video sequence. As shown in the results of computer simulation, the proposed method provides relatively good segmentation results for moving object and specially comes up with reasonable segmentation results in the edge areas with lower contrast.