Apparatus for encoding a video signal using feature point based motion estimation

摘要

A motion-compensated video signal encoder has a circuit for determining a predicted current frame based on a current frame and a previous frame of a digital video signal. The circuit includes a region detection circuit for detecting a processing region encompassing a moving object from the previous frame based on a difference between the current and the previous frames to generate region information representing the detected processing region. Therefore, a number of pixels is selected from the pixels contained in the detected processing region as feature points based on the region information. A first set of motion vectors between the current and the previous frames, each of the first set of motion vectors representing a motion for each of the selected pixels is then detected. The first set of motion vectors is used for predicting the predicted current frame and transmitted as a set of motion vectors of the video signal together with the region information.