Color video compression using fractal-based segmentation scheme

Abstract

Low bit rate color image sequence coding is very important for video transmission and storage applications. Color images are usually com pressed in a luminance-chrominance coordinate space, with the comp ressionperformed independently for each coordinate by applying the monochrome image processing techniques. For image sequence compression, the design of an accurate and efficient alogorithm for computing motion to exploit the temporal redundancy has been one of the most active research areas in com puter vision and image compression [1-4]. Pixel-based motion estimation algorithms address pixel correspondence directly by identifying a set of local features and com puting a match between these features across the frames [5]. These direct techniques share the common pitfall of high computation complexity resulting from the dense vector fields produced. For block matching motion estimation algorithms, the quad-tree data structure is frequently used in image coding to recursively decompose an image plane into four ono-overlapping rectangular blocks [6,7].