Fast approach of sprite coding for video content

Abstract

Sprite coding for video content is a novel coding technique for low bit-rate compression applications. It has been used in MPEG-4 standard, which is a new generation coding standard of MPEG. But the bottleneck of usage of sprite coding in the real-time coding is the speed of global motion estimation because the speed of calculation of global motion estimation is too slow at present. The fast method of sprite coding is studied in the paper. A new fast and robust approach of global motion estimation is proposed. Compared to the traditional algorithm of global motion estimation, the new algorithm is much faster, and the estimated results are comparable. The global motion estimation is the most time-consuming process in the sprite coding for video, so to accelerate the calculation of global motion estimation will increase the speed of sprite coding. Thus the approach of sprite coding using the proposed global motion estimation is challenging in real-time video coding application. The technique of robust statistics and noise filter is introduced in the algorithm of improved global motion estimation. Some comparative experimental results about sprite coding are shown at the end of paper.