This paper proposes a joint image segmentation and motion estimation technique for very low bit rate video coder. In the region-based coding, a segmentation algorithm is indispensable. Motivated by the observations of the conventional algorithm, we propose a jointly optimized image segmentation and motion estimation algorithm. In our algorithm, the input image is split into quad-tree structure, and the split regions are merged by greedy merging algorithm(GMA). In each step of GMA, two regions which have the minimum cost are merged. Since we have chosen the cost as the increase of DFD energy, the image is segmented into a set of regions with minimum DFD energy. By the computer simulation, we show the segmentation results have much lower DFD energy compared to the block-based motion estimation.
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