Motion Estimation Techniques for Digital TV: A Review and a New Contribution

The key to high performance in image sequence coding lies in an efficient reduction of the temporal redundancies. For this purpose, motion estimation and compensation techniques have been suc­ cessfully applied. This paper studies motion estimation algorithms in the context of first generation coding techniques commonly used in digital TV. In this framework, estimating the motion in the scene is not an intrinsic goal. Motion estimation should indeed provide good temporal prediction and simultaneously require low overhead information. More specifically, the aim is to minimize globally the bandwidth corresponding to both the prediction error information and the motion parameters. This paper first clarifies the notion of motion, reviews classical motion estimation tech­ niques, and outlines new perspectives. Block matching techniques are shown to be the most appropriate in the framework of first generation coding. To overcome the drawbacks characteristic of most block matching techniques, this paper proposes a new locally adaptive multigrid block matching motion estimation technique. This algorithm has been designed taking into account the above aims. It leads to a robust motion field estimation, precise prediction along moving edges and a decreased amount of side information in uniform areas. Furthermore, the algorithm controls the accuracy of the motion estimation procedure in order to optimally balance the amount of information corresponding to the prediction error and to the motion parameters. Experimental results show that the technique results in greatly enhanced visual quality and significant saving in terms of bit rate when compared to classical block matching techniques.