Drone HDR Infrared Video Coding via Aerial Map Prediction

In this paper, we present a novel drone high dynamic range infrared video coding algorithm based on aerial map prediction. First, at the encoder side we accumulate input frames in a buffer and use them to build an aerial map. Then we apply global motion estimation to extract the most similar frame from the aerial map and use it as an extra reference frame in the list of reference frames of H.265/HEVC video coding standard. The map is compressed by H.265/HEVC Intra and included into the overall bit stream. The global motion estimation may reflect the camera rotation which is typical for UAV video sequences. As a result, the overall coding performance is improved. Experimental results show that for a test video with camera rotation the proposed algorithm provides 3-35% bit rate savings comparing to the H.265/HEVC.