Video Compression with 3-D Pose Tracking, PDE-Based Image Coding, and Electrostatic Halftoning

Recent video compression algorithms such as the members of the MPEG or H.26x family use image transformations to store individual frames, and motion compensation between these frames. In contrast, the video codec presented here is a model-based approach that encodes fore- and background independently. It is well-suited for applications with static backgrounds, i.e. for applications such as traffic or security surveillance, or video conferencing. Our video compression algorithm tracks moving foreground objects and stores the obtained poses. Furthermore, a compressed version of the background image and some other information such as 3-D object models are encoded. In a second step, recent halftoning and PDE-based image compression algorithms are employed to compress the encoding error. Experiments show that the stored videos can have a significantly better quality than state-of-the-art algorithms such as MPEG-4.