- Funding Body:
EPSRC
- The aim of this project is to provide a realistic route
to improved motion estimation for moving picture compression by utilising
the increasing power of parallel processing. An existing optical flow technique
will be improved, so that it can be used to generate unambiguous areas
of uniform motion within an image sequence; this technique is computationally
intensive, but is amenable to parallel implementation. The performance
of the new estimation method can then be compared with conventional block
matching. The results of this work should be immediately applicable and
can be used within the scope of existing coding standards such as MPEG.
Improved methods of efficiently coding moving area information will also be investigated. This will be a `bottom-up' approach driven by pixel level motion vector information derived by the optical flow method. Parallel implementation strategies will be considered at several stages of algorithm development. Parallel implementations on relatively coarse and fine grain distributed systems and more tightly coupled shared memory machines will be investigated. The project will have access to all three of these platforms, and as they are industry standards the software products should be widely usable.
