Region-based fractal coding of monocular and stereo video sequences

In order to realize the efficient and economical transmission/storage of monocular and especially the stereo video sequences, and also the region-based functionality of MPEG-4, we propose a new monocular and stereo video sequences compression scheme. The CPM/NCIM fractal coding scheme is applied on each region independently by a prior image segmentation map (alpha plane) which is exactly the same as in MPEG-4. We encode the first n frames of right video sequence as a "set" using the Circular Prediction Mapping (CPM) and encode the remaining frames using the Non Contractive Interframe Mapping (NCIM). The CPM and NCIM accomplish the motion estimation/compensation which can exploit the high temporal correlations between the adjacent frames of right sequence. At the same time, we exploit the spatial correlations between the left and right frames by searching the similar blocks using quadtreebased disparity estimation/compensation. The testing results with the nature stereo video sequences provide promising performances at low bit rate coding, such as the application in video conference. We believe it will be a powerful and efficient technique for the stereo video sequences coding.