METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR REGION-BASED MOVING IMAGE ENCODING AND DECODING

• US 20070009046A1
• Filed: 09/13/2006
• Published: 01/11/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 04/24/1997
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Kohtaro Asai, Shunichi Sekiguchi, Yoshimi Isu
• Original Assignee: Kohtaro Asai, Shunichi Sekiguchi, Yoshimi Isu
• Inventors: Asai, Kohtaro, Isu, Yoshimi, SEKIGUCHI, Shunichi
• Application Number:
  US11/531,633
• Publication Number:
  US 20070009046A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 375/240.250
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/119 Adaptive subdivision aspects, e.g. subdivision of a picture into rectangular or non-rectangular coding blocks
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/124 Quantisation
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/137 Motion inside a coding unit, e.g. average field, frame or block difference
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/14 Coding unit complexity, e.g. amount of activity or edge presence estimation H04N19/146 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/146 Data rate or code amount at the encoder output
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/147 according to rate distortion criteria rate-distortion as a criterion for motion estimation H04N19/567
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/15 by monitoring actual compressed data size at the memory before deciding storage at the transmission buffer
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/17 the unit being an image region, e.g. an object
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/176 the region being a block, e.g. a macroblock
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/19 using optimisation based on Lagrange multipliers
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/30 using hierarchical techniques, e.g. scalability H04N19/63 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/61 in combination with predictive coding

Abstract

In partitioning and encoding an image into multiple regions, the degree of freedom of the region shape has generally been low and setting regions based on image features was difficult. A moving image encoding apparatus includes a region partitioning section, an encoder, and a memory for motion-compensated prediction. The region partitioning section includes a partitioning processing section and an integration processing section. The partitioning processing section partitions the input image based on a criterion relating to the state of partition. The integration processing section integrates mutually close regions based on a criterion relating to the state of integration. Thereafter, each region is encoded. A large variety of region shapes can be produced by the integration processing section.

Claims

1. A moving image decoding apparatus for decoding encoded data of an image which is input, the image being encoded after being partitioned into a plurality of regions, the apparatus comprising:

a region shape decoding section for restoring a shape of each region which is partitioned during encoding based on region shape information contained in the encoded data; and

an image data decoding section for specifying the order in which the regions are encoded based on the shape of each region which has been restored and then decoding the encoded data to derive an image of each region therefrom.