Segmentation of image sequences for object oriented coding

This paper presents an algorithm for segmentation of image sequences where specially aspects for object oriented coding are taken into account. A fundamental requirement of such applications is the temporal stability of the segmentation. This is improved compared to other existing approaches by including motion estimation into the segmentation process. Additionally, a hierarchical approach enables an efficient predictive coding on one hand and a semantic data access on the other hand. As a direct result from using full colour information for the segmentation process, coding of the chrominance information can be done with extremely high compression ratios. Thus there is nearly no extra coding effort for colour images compared to greyscale images.