Color Transfer Using Motion Estimations and Its Application to Video Compression

In this paper a novel scheme for colored video compression using color transfer techniques is proposed. Color transfer for video sequences is made more accurate by incorporation of motion information in the transfer mechanism. Encoder and decoder architectures for the proposed compression scheme are also presented. Compression is achieved by firstly discarding chrominance information for all but selected reference frames and then using motion prediction and DCT based quantization techniques. While decoding, luminance-only frames are colored using chrominance information from the reference frames using the proposed color transfer technique. Furthermore, this strategy is such that it can be seamlessly integrated with traditional hybrid compression schemes like MPEG1 and H.263.