Object-oriented analysis-synthesis coding based on moving two-dimensional objects

An object-oriented analysis-synthesis coder is presented which encodes arbitrarily shaped objects instead of rectangular blocks. The objects are described by three parameter sets defining their motion, shape and colour. Throughout this contribution, the colour parameters denote the luminance and chrominance values of the object surface. The parameter sets of each object are obtained by image analysis based on source models of moving 2D-objects and coded by an object-dependent parameter coding. Using the coded parameter sets an image can be reconstructed by model-based image synthesis. In order to cut down the generated bit-rate of the parameter coding, the colour updating of an object is suppressed if the modelling of the object by the source model is sufficiently exact, i.e., if only a relatively small colour update information would be needed for an errorless image synthesis. Omitting colour update information, small position errors of objects denoted as geometrical distortions are allowed for image synthesis instead of quantization error distortions. Tolerating geometrical distortions, the image area to be updated by colour coding can be decreased to 4% of the image size without introducing annoying distortions. As motion and shape parameters can efficiently be coded, about 1 bit per pel remains for colour updating in a 64 kbit/s coder compared to about 0.1 bit per pel in the standard reference coder (RM8) of the CCITT. Experimental results concerning the efficient coding of motion and shape parameters are given and discussed. The coding of the colour information will be dealt with in further research.