Detection and encoding of occluded areas in very low bit rate video coding

One of the challenging problems that most existing video codecs face today is the encoding of the information pertaining to the occluded areas, i.e., the areas which are covered or uncovered by moving objects. The existing techniques necessitate the transmission of the position information of the occluded areas following the detection process, which can constitute a large overhead in bandwidth consumption. In addition, these detection techniques fail under noisy conditions. On the other hand, no effort was made to incorporate the spatio-temporal correlation that exists between motion fields of consecutive frames. A new method to detect the occluded areas is described. In this method, the decoder is given additional intelligence to extract the position information of the occluded areas, thus reducing the bandwidth needed to transmit the occlusion information significantly. According to the proposed method, the temporal correlation of the motion fields is exploited. The proposed method is robust under noisy conditions and provides a computationally simple solution.