• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.11B no.1
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• pp.27-34
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• 2004

This paper proposes a method to trace and interpret a moving object based on the information which can be directly obtained from MPEG-2 compressed video stream without decoding process. In the proposed method, the motion flow is constructed from the motion vectors included in compressed video. We calculate the amount of pan, tilt, and zoom associated with camera operations using generalized Hough transform. The local object motion can be extracted from the motion flow after the compensation with the parameters related to the global camera motion. Initially, a moving object to be traced is designated by user via bounding box. After then automatic tracking Is performed based on the accumulated motion flows according to the area contributions. Also, in order to reduce the cumulative tracking error, the object area is reshaped in the first I-frame of a GOP by matching the DCT coefficients. The proposed method can improve the computation speed because the information can be directly obtained from the MPEG-2 compressed video, but the object boundary is limited by macro-blocks rather than pixels. Also, the proposed method is proper for approximate object tracking rather than accurate tracing of an object because of limited information available in the compressed video data.