Joint contour-based and motion-based image sequence segmentation for TV image coding at very low bit rate

This paper describes a spatio-temporal segmentation of image sequences for object-oriented low bit rate image coding. The spatio-temporal segmentation is received by merging the spatial homogeneous regions into motion homogeneous ones. Each of these regions is characterized by a motion parameters vector and structural information which represents a polygonal approximation of region border. The segmentation of the current frames in the sequence is obtained by prediction and refinement. A predictive coding scheme is developed. Some estimates of the quantity of information are given.