Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Berthold K Horn

Anantha P Chandrakasan

Ichiro Masaki

Marcelo M Mizuki

Ujjaval Desai

David L Standley

A method and apparatus for motion estimation in a video signal includes an edge detector for generating present and reference binary edge bit maps and a binary block matcher for receiving the present and reference binary edge bit maps from the edge detector and for generating a motion vector for each of a plurality of blocks in the binary edge bit maps. By using binary edge bit map data to generate motion vectors, computational requirements are reduced. If the apparatus is provided as an integrated circuit, the technique of the present invention reduces cost, power requirements and size of the integrated circuit.

Method and apparatus for motion estimation in a video signal

Edge or contour information is extracted from an image array by filtering and encoded. In order to improve reproduction accuracy, two separate filters are used to detect edge information. One of the filters detects 'sharp' edges, or edges in which the discontinuity in pixel intensity values occurs over a range of a few pixels. The other filter detects 'level' edges in which the pixel intensity value discontinuity occurs over a larger range of pixels than the 'sharp' edges. The 'smooth' areas between edges or contours are assumed to vary continuously between the contours, but for efficient implementation, a one-dimensional linear interpolation is used to regenerate the contour information between edges. In addition, to further improve performance, a line is fitted to the pixel intensity data. The end values of this line are then used for the pixel intensity data. In order to still further improve performance, the pixel intensity values associated with each contour are divided into groups and each group is then encoded. Another improvement is accomplished by mean coding the residual error.

Method and apparatus for compressing and decompressing a video image

An analog VLSI microchip which uses moments to determine the position and orientation of an object in a scene is disclosed. The imaging sensors are implemented on the chip itself using standard fabrication processes. The method allows very high speed computation in a small, low cost, and low power device. The first moments determine the centroid of the image, which provides the position. The second moments, together with the first moments, determine the axis of least inertia, which provides the orientation. The method uses a resistive grid with nodes containing intensity data (in the form of voltages) corresponding to the image. The moment extraction method is a two-stage dimensional reduction of data. First, the two-dimensional array of intensity data is reduced to a one-dimensional array of data (in the form of currents) by the resistive grid. Second, the one-dimensional data array, which is available at the periphery of the grid, is reduced to a data vector, the size of which is independent of the grid size.

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Carlisle, MA, United States of America

Berthold K Horn