An effective mesh-based motion compensation technique for video coding

The block-matching algorithm is the most popular motion compensation technique in video coding. However, it cannot provide acceptable quality at very low bit rate. In this paper, a new mesh-based motion compensation method is proposed to attack the problem. First, a regular non-uniform mesh, which has regular structure with variable patch size, is presented. The patch size is varied according to motion activity of a video sequence. Next, a weighted interpolation block matching is developed to improve the estimate accuracy of displacements of grid points. It utilizes the motion correlation between a grid point and its associated patches. Finally, based on the new mesh and motion estimation scheme, an efficient motion compensation algorithm is developed. When compared to the conventional motion compensation techniques, the proposed method improves performance significantly with lower computational complexity and overhead information bits.