A fast quadtree motion segmentation for image sequence coding

A new fast quadtree-based variable size block matching scheme is devised for image sequence coding. The novelty of the method lies in the quadtree-based block matching with significantly less computations. In the proposed method, the computational requirements for matching are largely transferred from the evaluation of the mean absolute difference to the computations of the sum norms of the blocks which can be easily obtained. The fast quadtree decomposition scheme partitions an image frame into uniform motion blocks (larger blocks) and non-uniform motion blocks (small blocks). Standard VQ-based interframe coding is applied to uniform motion blocks while non-uniform blocks are intraframe coded. Implementation of this method shows a significantly lower computational requirement and a good-quality reconstruction of images at low bit-rates. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.