Joint 3-D Motion/Disparity Segmentation for Object-Based Stereo Image Sequence Coding

An object-based coding scheme is proposed for the coding of the right channel of a stereoscopic image sequence, using motion and disparity information. A multiresolution block-based motion estimation approach is used for initialization, while disparity estimation is performed using a pixel-based hierarchical dynamic programming algorithm. A split and merge segmentation procedure based on both 3-D motion and disparity is then used to determine regions with similar motion and depth parameters. The segmentation part of the algorithm is interleaved with the estimation part in order to optimize the coding performance of the the segmentation procedure. This is combined with an e cient depth modeling method that o ers full depth information at the decoder site. In order to reduce the computational load of the merge phase of the algorithm, a fast algorithm is implemented which speeds up the merge procedure considerably. Motion and depth model parameters are then quantized and transmitted to the decoder along with the segmentation information. An object-based motion compensating scheme is then used to reconstruct the original image, based on the objects created by the segmentation approach. Subject Terms: Object-based Coding ; Joint Motion / Disparity Segmentation ; Joint Motion / Disparity Compensation.