• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.5A
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• pp.503-509
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• 2007

Low-power motion estimation is required for video coding in portable information devices. In this paper, we propose a low-power motion estimation algorithm and 1-D systolic may VLSI architecture using full search block matching algorithm (FSBMA). Main power dissipation sources of FSBMA are complex computations and frequent memory accesses for data in the search area. In the proposed algorithm, memory accesses and computations are reduced by using 1D PE (processing array) array architecture performing motion estimation of two neighboring blocks in parallel and by skipping unnecessary computations during motion estimation. The VLSI implementation results of the algorithm show that the proposed VLSI architecture can save 9.3% power dissipation and can operate two times faster than an existing low-power motion estimator.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2000.11d
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• pp.167-170
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• 2000

In this paper, we present a fast algorithm for the motion estimation using the efficient selection of an initial search position. In the method, we select the initial search position using the motion vector from the subsmpled images, the predicted motion vector from the neighbor blocks, and the (0,0) motion vector. While searching the candidate blocks, we use the spiral search pattern with the successive elimination algorithm(SEA) and the partial distortion elimination(PDE). The experiment results show that the complexity of the proposed algorithm is about 2∼3 times faster than the three-step search(TSS) with the PSNR loss of just 0.05［dB］∼0.1［dB］ than the full search algorithm PSNR. The search complexity can be reduced with quite a few PSNR loss by controling the number of the depth in the spiral search pattern.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.70-79
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• 2007

H.264/AVC has many repeated computation for motion estimation. Because of that, it takes much time to encode and it is very hard to implement into a real-time encoder. Many fast algorithms were proposed to reduce computation time but encoding quality couldn't be qualified. In this paper we proposed a new motion vector prediction method for efficient and fast full search H.264/AVC motion estimation. We proposed independent motion vector prediction and SAD share for motion estimation. Using our algorithm, motion estimation reduce calculation complexity 80% and less distortion of image (less PSNR drop) than previous full search scheme. We simulated our proposed method. Maximum Y PSNR drop is about 0.04 dB and average bit increasing is about 0.6%.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.539-548
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• 2013

Although Motion estimation (ME) plays an important role in digital video compression, it requires a complicated search procedure to find an optimal motion vector. Multi-view video is obtained by capturing one three-dimensional scene with many cameras at different positions. The computational complexity of motion estimation for Multi-view video coding increases in proportion to the number of cameras. To reduce computational complexity and maintain the image quality, a low complexity motion estimation search method is proposed in this paper. The proposed search method consists of four-grid diamond search patten, two-gird diamond search pattern and TZ 2 Point search pattern. These search patterns exploit the characteristics of the distribution of motion vectors to place the search points. Experiment results show that the speedup improvement of the proposed method over TZ search method (JMVC) can be up to 1.8~4.5 times faster by reducing the computational complexity and the image quality degradation is about to 0.01~0.24 (dB).

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.11-18
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a fast variable block matching algorithm for motion estimation based on bit-patterns. Motion estimation in the proposed algorithm is peformed after the representation of image sequence is transformed 8-bit pixel values into 1-bit ones by the mean pixel value of search block, which brings a short searching time by reducing the computational complexity. Moreover, adaptive searching methods according to the motion information of the block make the procedure of motion estimation efficient by eliminating unnecessary searching processes of low motion block and deepening a searching procedure in high motion block. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides bettor performance - average 0.5dB PSNR improvement and about 99% savings in the number of operations - than full search Hock matching algorithm with a fixed block size.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.263-269
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• 2008

Visual odometry is a popular approach to estimating robot motion using a monocular or stereo camera. This paper proposes a novel visual odometry scheme using a stereo camera for robust estimation of a 6 DOF motion in the dynamic environment. The false results of feature matching and the uncertainty of depth information provided by the camera can generate the outliers which deteriorate the estimation. The outliers are removed by analyzing the magnitude histogram of the motion vector of the corresponding features and the RANSAC algorithm. The features extracted from a dynamic object such as a human also makes the motion estimation inaccurate. To eliminate the effect of a dynamic object, several candidates of dynamic objects are generated by clustering the 3D position of features and each candidate is checked based on the standard deviation of features on whether it is a real dynamic object or not. The accuracy and practicality of the proposed scheme are verified by several experiments and comparisons with both IMU and wheel-based odometry. It is shown that the proposed scheme works well when wheel slip occurs or dynamic objects exist.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.14B no.4
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• pp.311-320
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• 2007

This paper presents vision-based 3D facial expression animation technique and system which provide the robust 3D head pose estimation and real-time facial expression control. Many researches of 3D face animation have been done for the facial expression control itself rather than focusing on 3D head motion tracking. However, the head motion tracking is one of critical issues to be solved for developing realistic facial animation. In this research, we developed an integrated animation system that includes 3D head motion tracking and facial expression control at the same time. The proposed system consists of three major phases: face detection, 3D head motion tracking, and facial expression control. For face detection, with the non-parametric HT skin color model and template matching, we can detect the facial region efficiently from video frame. For 3D head motion tracking, we exploit the cylindrical head model that is projected to the initial head motion template. Given an initial reference template of the face image and the corresponding head motion, the cylindrical head model is created and the foil head motion is traced based on the optical flow method. For the facial expression cloning we utilize the feature-based method, The major facial feature points are detected by the geometry of information of the face with template matching and traced by optical flow. Since the locations of varying feature points are composed of head motion and facial expression information, the animation parameters which describe the variation of the facial features are acquired from geometrically transformed frontal head pose image. Finally, the facial expression cloning is done by two fitting process. The control points of the 3D model are varied applying the animation parameters to the face model, and the non-feature points around the control points are changed by use of Radial Basis Function(RBF). From the experiment, we can prove that the developed vision-based animation system can create realistic facial animation with robust head pose estimation and facial variation from input video image.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.2579-2585
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• 2010

This paper proposes a dynamic human pose tracking method using motion-based search strategy from an image sequence obtained from a monocular camera. The proposed method compares the image features between 3D human model projections and real input images. The method repeats the process until predefined criteria and then estimates 3D human pose that generates the best match. When searching for the best matching configuration with respect to the input image, the search region is determined from the estimated 2D image motion and then search is performed randomly for the body configuration conducted within that search region. As the 2D image motion is highly constrained, this significantly reduces the dimensionality of the feasible space. This strategy have two advantages: the motion estimation leads to an efficient allocation of the search space, and the pose estimation method is adaptive to various kinds of motion.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.81-87
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• 2006

In this paper, an experimental optical head tracker system is designed and constructed. The system is composed of the infrared LEDs and two infrared CCD cameras to filter out the interference of another light in the limited environment like the cockpit. Then the optical head tracker algorithm is designed by using the feature detection algorithm and the 3D motion estimation algorithm. The feature detection algorithm, used to obtain the 2D position coordinates of the features on the image plane, is implemented by using the thresholding and the masking techniques. The 3D motion estimation algorithm which estimates the motion of a pilot's head is implemented by using the extended Kalman filter (EKF). Also, we used the precise rate table to verify the performance of the experimental optical head tracker system and compared the rotational performance of this system with the inertial sensor.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.405-406
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• 2008

This paper presents a high performance 2D PE architecture for H.264 Motion Estimation(ME). While existing 2D PE architectures reuse the overlapped data of adjacent search windows scanned in 1 or 3-way, the new architecture scan adjacent windows and multiple paths instead of single raster and zigzag scanning of adjacent windows in 4 way(up,down,left,right). By reducing the redundant access factor by 1.4, the new 4-way search window improve the memory bandwidth by 70-58% compared with 1/3-way search window. With Altera Stratix-III implementation, the high performance 2D PE architecture deals with SD ($720{\times}480$) video of 2 reference frame, $48{\times}48$ search area and $16{\times}16$ macroblock by 30fps at 97.1MHz.