METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR HIERARCHICAL MOTION ESTIMATION USING DFD-BASED IMAGE SEGMENTATION

In hierarchical motion estimation, in each motion estimation hierarchy level, a pixel block matcher for comparing correspondingly sampled pixel values of a current image and a delayed previous image is used in order to compute a motion vector for every pixel, wherein - by evaluating displaced frame differences in the measurement window - a segmentation of the measurement window into different moving object regions is performed. The corresponding segmentation information is stored, and the stored segmentation information is used as an initial segmentation mask for motion estimation in the following finer level of the motion estimation hierarchy. In the following finer level of the motion estimation hierarchy an updated segmentation information is determined. This processing continues until the finest level of said motion estimation hierarchy is reached. The resulting segmentation information values of successive search window positions can be combined.