2241 results about "Motion estimation" patented technology

Motion estimation of a macro block in inter16×16, inter16×8, and inter8×16 modes is performed and a determination of whether to further perform motion estimation in a P8×8 mode is made. Motion estimation in P8×8 mode is either omitted or performed and one mode is determined according to a rate distortion cost of the respective modes. Spatial prediction encoding may then be performed or omitted based on comparing the rate distortion cost of the one mode with a predetermined value. Accordingly, by selectively omitting variable block motion estimation and spatial prediction encoding which are the most complicated operations in an H.264 encoder, determining an encoding mode is rapidly performed such that encoding speed increases.

A novel method, system, and apparatus for efficient multi-block motion estimation in a digital signal compression and coding scheme. This invention selects only a few representative block sizes for motion estimation when certain favourable conditions occur, rather than using all available block sizes. This invention produces significantly reduced computational costs with virtually no sacrifice in visual quality and in bit-rate.

The invention discloses a motion vector forecasting method in a resolution quantizing structure, wherein, forecasting motion vectors of macro blocks in enhancement layers are acquired by utilization of relativity of motion vectors of a time domain, a space domain and an interlayer domain. The realization process is that: on the time domain, candidate motion vectors of the time domain are acquired from motion vectors of macro blocks with the same position with the prior frame; on the space domain, candidate motion vectors of the space domain are acquired from motion vectors of adjacent blocks; on the interlayer domain, candidate motion vectors of the interlayer domain are acquired from corresponding motion vectors with low space domain resolution hierarchy; candidate motion vectors with minimum motion estimation cost are selected to be forecasting motion vectors by selection among the candidate motion vectors of the time domain, the space domain and the interlayer domain. The invention has the advantages of capability of acquiring more accurate forecasting motion vectors, capability of compressing code rate of motion vectors, and obtaining of performance gain.

Transcoding is achieved by decoding a received video signal which has been coded according to a first coding scheme employing motion compensation and carries coded data and motion compensation information, and encoding the decoded according to a second coding scheme also employing motion compensation. Estimated motion vectors are generated for a current frame of the video signal, using vectors which, in the received signal, accompanying at least one other frame of the video signal. These may be used directly or used to define a search area for motion estimation.

A metadata extraction unit has a feature point selection and motion estimation unit 62 for extracting at least one feature point representing characteristics of the video/audio signals in a compressed domain of the video/audio signals. Thus, reduction of time or cost for processing can be realized and it makes it possible to process effectively.

Video encoding device including a video input processor, for receiving said video signal, a global controller, for controlling the global operation of the video encoding device, a motion estimation processor, a digital signal processor and a bit-stream processor, wherein the global controller stores encodes commands received from a host interface thereby programming the video input processor, the motion estimation processor, the digital signal processor and the bit-stream processor, the video input processor receives and stores the video signal in an external memory unit, the motion estimation processor retrieves the video signal from the memory unit, generates motion analysis of the video signal, stores the motion analysis in the memory unit and provides the motion analysis to the digital signal processor, the digital signal processor processes the video signal according to the motion analysis, thereby producing an encoding commands sequence and encoded data, the bit-stream processor produces an encoded video signal according to the encoding command sequence and the encoded data.

A method and apparatus for scalable coding of a motion vector generated during motion estimation, in which a generated motion vector field is separated into a base layer and an enhancement layer according to pixel accuracies to obtain a layered structure for a motion vector. In addition, the motion vector field has a layered structure including a base layer composed of motion vectors of blocks larger than or equal to a predetermined size and at least one enhancement layer composed of motion vectors of blocks smaller than a predetermined size.

An imaging device and methods of stabilizing video captured using a rolling shutter operation. Motion estimation is used to determine a row motion vector for individual rows of a current frame of a pixel array. The row motion vectors are used to map the location of pixels in the current frame to a mapped frame representing a single acquisition time for the current frame.

A method for motion estimation within biological tissue is disclosed. The method involves acoustically coupling a transducer to a target biological tissue, which transducer emits an ultrasonic signal and collects the energy back-scattered by the target issue. A first set of energy data is collected and stored, then target tissue is axially compressed and a second set of ultrasonic energy data is collected and stored. One of the first and second data sets is warped to account for the anticipated compression forming a warped data set. This warped data set is cross-correlated with the unwarped one of the first and said second data sets to obtain a fine scale displacement of said target biological tissue from the displacement estimated by the warping. This fine scale displacement is summed with the warped data set to obtain a total axial displacement. A gradient of the total axial displacement is taken and used to form a strain image. An apparatus for practicing this method is also disclosed.

Embodiments include a motion estimation method performed in a parallel processing system that determines a list of several candidate motion vectors for a macroblock of a video image and retains them through multiple computation passes. All candidate motion vectors are used as potential neighboring predictors, so that the best combination of differential vectors rises to the top of the candidate list. Numerous combinations of differential motion vectors are considered during the process that compares motion vectors among up to eight neighboring macroblocks, instead of simply between pairs of macroblocks. The motion estimation system is configured to use a large number of compute engines, such as on a highly parallel GPU platform. This is achieved by having no dependencies between macroblocks except one per pass. This allows the number of calculations per pass to be very large.

Region-of-interest cropping of high-resolution video is supported video compression and extraction methods. The compression method divides each frame into virtual tiles, each containing a rectangular array of macroblocks. Intra-frame compression uses constrained motion estimation to ensure that no macroblock references data beyond the edge of a tile. Extra slice headers are included on the left side of every macroblock row in the tiles to permit access to macroblocks on the left edge of each tile during extraction. The compression method may also include breaking skipped macroblock runs into multiple smaller skipped macroblock runs. The extraction method removes slices from virtual tiles that intersect the region-of-interest to produce cropped frames. The cropped digital video stream and the compressed digital video stream have the same video sequence header information.

A method for tracking one or multiple objects from an input video sequence allows a user to select one or more regions that contain the object(s) of interest in the first and the last frame of their choice. An initialization component selects the current and the search frame and divides the selected region into equal sized macroblocks. An edge detection component computes the gradient of the current frame for each macroblock and a threshold component decides then which of the macroblocks contain sufficient information for tracking the desired object. A motion estimation component computes for each macroblock in the current frame its position in the search frame. The motion estimation component utilizes a search component that executes a novel search algorithm to find the best match. The mean absolute difference between two macroblocks is used as the matching criterion. The motion estimation component returns the estimated displacement vector for each block. An output component collects the motion vectors of all the predicted blocks and calculates the new position of the object in the next frame.

Digitalized video images are compressed in several steps in order to provide a system for transmitting moving video pictures via narrow band channels, such as the telephone network. The system is based on any extension of the bit-plane coding technique to video sequences and lossy conditions. The compression technique can also be advantageously used in a lossless compression system. The system involves the steps of bit plane representation and skipping the least significant bit plane(s), shifting the pixels, coding with a Gray code, the use of segmentation, and motion-estimation/motion compensation and application of a transmit/not transmit/motion compensate (TX/NT/MC) procedure, exploiting of the temporal redundancy of two corresponding bit planes via an XOR operation on two successive images, and a plane-by-plane application of an extended RLEID technique. The RLEID technique includes coding a run of like binary symbols with one word, the run including a transition between the penultimate and ultimate binary symbol.

A motion estimation and compensation device that avoids discrepancies in chrominance components which could be introduced in the process of motion vector estimation. The device has a motion vector estimator for finding motion vectors in given interlace-scanning chrominance-subsampled video signals. The estimator compares each candidate block in a reference picture with a target block in an original picture by using a sum of absolute differences (SAD) in luminance as similarity metric, chooses a best matching candidate block that minimizes the SAD, and determines its displacement relative to the target block. In this process, the estimator gives the SAD of each candidate block an offset determined from the vertical component of a corresponding motion vector, so as to avoid chrominance discrepancies. A motion compensator then produces a predicted picture using such motion vectors and calculates prediction error by subtracting the predicted picture from the original picture.

A method of inter prediction encoding of an image, the method including: searching for a first reference block in a reference picture by using a current block, and estimating a first motion vector in a first pel unit in regards to the first reference block; estimating a second motion vector by using pixels included in a pre-encoded area adjacent to the current block, and pixels adjacent to the first reference block, and determining a second reference block based on the second motion vector; and encoding the current block based on the first motion vector and the second reference block.

Methods for motion estimation with adaptive motion accuracy of the present invention include several techniques for computing motion vectors of high pixel accuracy with a minor increase in computation. One technique uses fast-search strategies in sub-pixel space that smartly searches for the best motion vectors. An alternate technique estimates high-accurate motion vectors using different interpolation filters at different stages in order to reduce computational complexity. Yet another technique uses rate-distortion criteria that adapts according to the different motion accuracies to determine both the best motion vectors and the best motion accuracies. Still another technique uses a VLC table that is interpreted differently at different coding units, according to the associated motion vector accuracy.

The invention relates to a video encoder (201) for encoding a video signal. The video encoder comprises a segmentation processor (207) which divides the picture into picture regions. Preferably, picture regions having a high degree of flatness or uniformity are determined in this way. A characteristics processor (209) determine a spatial frequency characteristic for each picture region, and a coding controller (211) selects an encoding block size, such as a prediction block size for motion estimation, in response to the spatial frequency characteristic. An encode processor (213) encodes the picture using the selected encoding block size. Specifically, increasing block sizes are selected for increasing degrees of uniformity or flatness indicated by the spatial frequency characteristic. Thereby, an increasing proportion of high frequency components and a consistent choice of encoding block sizes are maintained, and thus the coding artefacts from many encoders having variable prediction block sizes is reduced. The invention is particularly suitable for H.264 and similar encoders.