Patent Document ID: 8605786
Application ID: 12670041
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for hierarchical motion vector processing implemented by code stored on a non-transient computer readable medium, comprising: Receiving image data including a motion vector field for a block in an image and residual energy concerning the image block; developing determining reliability levels of blocks in the image data using the residual energy according to residual energy levels; developing a merging map based upon the residual energy distribution and vector reliability classification and merging blocks based upon the merging map in accordance with the reliability levels of blocks determined in said step of determining; selecting single motion vectors for each merged group of blocks from its own and neighboring block reliable motion vectors; determining the bi-direction difference between the reference frame and the decoded frame for the selected motion vectors; iteratively assigning motion vectors of blocks merged in said step of merging by minimizing bi-directional prediction difference on successively smaller merged blocks, wherein the iteratively assigning includes re-classifying motion vector reliability using the bi-directional difference and refining motion vectors between the reference frame and current decoded frame using the re-classified reliability and the bi-directional difference; and smoothing motion vectors.