VIDEO COMPRESSION USING MOSAIC REPRESENTATIONS

We describe a technique for video compression based on a mosaic image representation obtained by aligning all frames of a video sequence, giving a panoramic view of the scene. We describe two types of mosaics, static and dynamic, which are suited for storage and transmission applications, respectively. In each case, the mosaic construction process aligns the images using a global parametric motion transformation, usually canceling the effect of camera motion on the dominant portion of the scene. The residual motions that are not compensated by the parametric motion are then analyzed for their significance and coded. The mosaic representation exploits large scale spatial and temporal correlations in image sequences. In many applications where there is significant camera motion (e.g., remote surveillance), it performs substantially better than traditional interframe compression methods and offers the potential for very low bit-rate transmission. In storage applications, such as digital libraries and video editing environments, it has the additional benefit of enabling direct access and retrieval of single frames at a time.