Joint motion estimation and segmentation for very low bit rate video coding

Motion estimation is a key issue in video coding. In very low bitrate applications, the amount of the side information for the motion field presents an important portion of the total bitrate. This paper presents a joint motion estimation, segmentation and coding technique, which tries to reduce the segmentation and motion side information, while providing a similar or smaller prediction error when compared to more classical motion estimation techniques. The main application in mind is a region based coding approach in which the consecutive frames of the video are divided into regions having similar motion vectors with simple shapes, easy to encode.