Motion estimation and compensation in the redundant-wavelet domain using triangle meshes

In this paper, a technique is presented that incorporates an irregular triangle mesh into wavelet-domain motion estimation and compensation using a shift-invariant redundant-wavelet transform. The main contribution of this work resides in a demonstration that triangle-mesh motion estimation and compensation can be deployed more effectively in the redundant-wavelet domain thanks to a simple correlation operator that is robust to the prediction residual, a noise-like signal that hinders spatial-domain gradient-based efforts to locate image edges which persist from frame to frame. In the proposed technique, motion compensation takes place through an affine transform mapping triangles from one frame to the next, while the motion-compensated residual is downsampled to a non-redundant form which is then coded using any wavelet-based still-image coder. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique significantly outperforms not only the usual spatial-domain approach to mesh-based motion estimation and compensation, but also the emerging wavelet-based coders that employ traditional block-based structures, particularly for sequences with fast or complex motion. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.