Motion estimation based color transfer and its application to color video compression

In this paper a novel scheme for color video compression using color transfer technique is proposed. Towards this, a new color transfer mechanism for video using motion estimation is presented. Encoder and decoder architectures for the proposed compression scheme are also presented. In this scheme, compression is achieved by firstly discarding chrominance information for all but selected reference frames and then using motion prediction and discrete cosine transform (DCT) based quantization. At decompression stage, the luminance-only frames are colored using chrominance information from the reference frames applying the proposed color transfer technique. To integrate color transfer mechanism with hybrid compression scheme a new color transfer protocol is defined. Both compression scheme and color transfer work in YCbCr color space.