Median filtering-based pyramidal motion vector estimation

In this paper, a median filtering-based hierarchical motion vector estimation scheme making use of a pyramidal data structure is proposed. Compared to the conventional hierarchical motion vector estimation schemes, the proposed scheme overcomes the problem of propagation of false motion vectors across resolutions. Simulation studies show that the proposed scheme not only improves the prediction accuracy with respect to the prediction mean square error, but also results in a smoother motion field, which can be encoded with less number of coding bits. It is shown that an improvement in the rate distortion performance is achieved with little increase in the computational complexity. It is also shown that Burt and Adelson’s pyramidal data structure provides the best performance among a number of the generating kernels considered in our study.