Background Sprite Generation Using MPEG Motion Vectors

Sprite coding, accepted by the emerging MPEG-4 standard is a very efficient method for representing the background video object. Still this sprite generation is an open issue due to the foreground objects which obstructs the accuracy of camera motion estimation and blurs the generated sprite. In this paper we propose a method for constructing the background sprite with partial decoding of the MPEG stream. Initially the Independently Moving Objects (IMO) are segmented out from the background by clustering the pre-processed motion vectors of MPEG video. The camera motion parameters are obtained from the motion information corresponding to the background region which is used for frame alignment.