HD motion estimation in a wavelet pyramid in JPEG2000 context

Global motion estimation (GME) is a step of primary importance in video analysis and Indexing. In this paper, we propose a method for estimating the global motion in HD sequences compressed with JPE2000, as it is the compression standard adopted by the digital cinema. To respect the scalability nature of the standard, our method works preferentially on the lower resolution sub-bands of the wavelet compressed frames. We combine a hierarchical block matching (BM) with a robust GME. This not only allows a regularization of the background motion by approximating the BM estimated motion vectors with the model found, but also indicates where motion has to be estimated with a better precision, typically on the foreground objects.