Motion estimation with accurate boundaries

Abstract

This paper investigates several techniques that increase the accuracy of motion boundaries in estimated motion fields of a local dense estimation scheme. In particular, we examine two matching metrics, one is MSE in the image domain and the other one is a recently proposed multiresolution metric that has been shown to produce more accurate motion boundaries. We also examine several different edge-preserving filters. The edge-aware moving average filter, proposed in this paper, takes an input image and the result of an edge detection algorithm, and outputs an image that is smooth except at the detected edges. Compared to the adoption of edge-preserving filters, we find that matching metrics play a more important role in estimating accurate and compressible motion fields. Nevertheless, the proposed filter may provide further improvements in the accuracy of the motion boundaries. These findings can be very useful for a number of recently proposed scalable interactive video coding schemes.