Compressed-domain registration techniques for MPEG video

A multi-scale DCT-domain image registration technique for two MPEG video inputs is proposed in this work. Several edge detectors are first applied to the luminance component of DC coefficients to generate the so-called difference maps for each input image. Then, a threshold is selected for each difference map to filter out regions of lower activity. Following that, we estimate the displacement parameters by examining the difference maps of the two input images associated with the same edge detector. Finally, the ultimate displacement vector is calculated by averaging the parameters from all detectors. In order to reach higher quality of the output mosaic, 1D alignment is locally applied to pixels around the boundaries of displacement that is decided in the previous step. It is shown that the proposed method reduces the computation complexity dramatically as compared to pixel-based image registration techniques while reaching a satisfactory result in composition. Moreover, we discuss how the overlapping region affects the quality of alignment.