Patent ID: 6829373
Filing Date: 2004-12-07
Classification: H04N

Abstract:
A method of estimating the motion field of a digital picture sequence comprising:dividing a current picture into macroblocks; for each macroblock of said current picture, determining a search window centered on a macroblock of a preceding picture placed in a same position of a considered macroblock of the current picture, at least one dimension of said search window being established as a function of the corresponding dimension of the search window used for said preceding picture, an estimated motion field of said preceding picture and threshold values, and the at least one dimension being equal to the corresponding dimension of the search window used for the preceding picture if a maximum motion vector of the preceding picture is between a pair of upper and lower threshold value, one half of the corresponding dimension of the search window used for the preceding picture, if the maximum motion vector of the preceding picture is less than the lower threshold, twice the corresponding dimension of the search window used for the preceding picture, if the maximum motion vector of the preceding picture is greater than the upper threshold; and carrying out an estimation of the motion field between the considered macroblock of the current picture and a macroblock most similar to it included in the search window.