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Procedia Computer Science 49 (2015) 42 – 49

ICAC3’15

Coding of video Sequences using Three Step Search Algorithm

S.M.Kulkarni1* , D.S.Bormane2 , S.L.Nalbalwar3
1
Research Scholar, JNTU Kakinada, India.
2
Principal,JSPM’s Rajarshi Shahu College of Engg. , S.P. Pune University , Pune, India
3
Professor & Head(E&Tc) ,Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Technological University, Lonere, Raigad, India.

Abstract

The rapid development in the technology has dramatic impact on the medical health care field. Medical data base obtained
with latest machines like CT Machine, MRI scanner requires large amount of memory storage and also it requires large
bandwidth for transmission of data in telemedicine applications. Thus there is need for video compression. As the database of
medical images contain number of frames (slices), hence while coding of these images there is need of motion estimation.
Motion estimation finds out movement of objects in an image sequence and gets motion vectors which represents estimated
motion of object in the frame. In order to reduce temporal redundancy between successive frames of video sequence, motion
compensation is preformed.
In this paper three step search (TSS) block matching algorithm is implemented on different types of video sequences. It is shown
that three step search algorithm produces better quality performance and less computational time compared with exhaustive full
search algorithm.
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of the 4th InternationalConference on Advances in Computing,
Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of the 4th International Conference on Advances in Computing,
Communication
Communication and and Control
Control (ICAC3’15)
(ICAC3’15).

Keywords: Block matching, motion estimation, Exhaustive Search, Three step search, video compression

* Corresponding author. Tel.: 91 9850257415; fax: +0-000-000-0000 .

E-mail address: smk_1@rediffmail.com

1877-0509 © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of the 4th International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communication and
Control (ICAC3’15)
doi:10.1016/j.procs.2015.04.225
 S.M. Kulkarni et al. / Procedia Computer Science 49 (2015) 42 – 49 43

1. Introduction

Due to rapid developing technology in medical health care field, ultra modern machines are available which
include CT scanner, Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), echo cardiographs, etc.[9]. With these machines doctors
can diagnose and analyses patient’s health. Medical data sets containing video obtained by above techniques need
large amount of memory space and it requires large bandwidth for sending the data from one place to another for
tele monitoring applications. Thus there is necessity for video compression technique which will reduce the amount
of data for representation of a video [1].
In some applications of video compression only compression ratio is important and quality can be comprised,
but in medical applications it requires both high quality and good compression ratio hence it is challenging task [3].
For diagnose purpose, compression ratio should not cause loss of details, no artifacts should be introduced. There is
also limit for storage and transmission band width. Thus there is much scope for progress in this area [6].
The paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we present review of previous research on compression of
video sequences. Section-III describes motion compensated coding, Block matching technique is explained in
section-IV. Three step search technique for motion estimation is elaborated in section-V. Implementation results are
given in section-VI. Finally conclusion is presented in section-VII.

2. Literature Survey

In medical field, Tsai et al. [2] developed a compression scheme for angiogram video sequence in 1994. It was
based on a full frame discrete wavelet transform. The local characteristics of frame are exploited to develop
compensated frame and it achieved high compression ratio. Gibson et al. [4] proposed that by adaptively searching
prediction error and modifying it accordingly, it is possible to eliminate artifects from final image, thus they
proposed a lossy wavelet based approach for compression of digital angiogram videos. Analysis of angiogram
videos, by higher frequency sub band wavelet decomposition reveals that significant sized regions contain no
diagnostic information [12].
Thus for diagnostically unimportant regions, texture modelling approach is used to encode high frequency sub band
wavelet coefficients and diagnostically important regions are coded in normal manner. This concept is applicable in
hybrid coding where loss less compression is performed for region of interest (ROI) and lossy compression in the
regions where high compression and reasonable good quality is required. ROI coding is performed to segment
diagnostic important region and it achieves good balance between video quality and compression ratio.
Up till now, numbers of efforts have been made to establish common video compression standard for medical
applications. The common standard is DICOM (Digital imaging and communication in medicine) which is used for
distribution and viewing of medical images [10]. For echo-cardiographs and CT image sequences this standard is
used which allows loss less and lossy compression. Enhanced CT image model has been coded into new version of
DICOM to improve transfer mechanism of CT frames. The popular lossy compression methods in DICOM are
JPEG 2000 and MPEG-2[13].

3. Motion Compensated Coding

Successive video frames may contain the same objects which are either still or moving. . Motion estimation
examines the movement of objects in an image sequence and gets vectors representing estimated motion . Data
compression is achieved through motion compensation which makes the use of object motion. In the consecutive
frames, there is high correlation, hence motion estimation and motion compensation is good technique for inter
frame coding [5].In real video scenes there is complex combination of translation and rotational motion. Such
motion is difficult to estimate and large amount of processing is required for it. Translation motion can be
implemented successfully because it can be estimated easily [8].
There is fact that for the number of frames of movie, the only difference between successive frames is the result of
either moving camera or an object in the frame is moving. Motion compensation exploits this fact [11]. Thus
information represented in one frame will be the same as information used in next frame. Fig.1 shows the block
diagram of motion compensated coding.
44 S.M. Kulkarni et al. / Procedia Computer Science 49 (2015) 42 – 49

Fig. 1 Motion compensated coding Technique

There are two sides, encoding and decoding. Enncoding side estimates the motion in the current frame witth respect to
previous frame. Motion compensated image for current frame is then decoded which is used as reference frame [16].
In typical inter frame coder, the input frame is subtracted from prediction of reference frame. Consequeently motion
vector and resulting error can be transmitted instead of original block, thus inter frame redundancy is reemoved and
data compression is achieved. At the receiver end, the decoder builds the frame difference signal from thet received
data and adds it to the reconstructed reference frames. The summation gives an exact replica of the cu urrent frame
[15]. The better the prediction the smaller the errror signal and hence the transmission bit rate.

4. Block Matching Technique

There are two mainstream techniques of motion

m estimation: first is pixel recursive algorithm(PRA) and second
is block matching algorithm(BMA) Pixel recurrsive algorithm uses gradient method[18] for individual pixel p motion
estimation whereas in the block matching algoorithm it is assumed that all the pixels within the block k has same
motion activity[19] . BMA estimates motion on the basis of rectangular block blocks and one motion vecctor for each
block is generated. PRAs have more computatioonal complexity and less regularity.
Fig.2 illustrates a process of block-matching alggorithm. In the block matching, current frame is divided into matrix
of macro blocks. These blocks are then comppared with cosponsoring block and its adjacent neighb bours in the
previous frame or reference frame, to create the vector that stipulates movement of macro block from onee location to
another in the reference frame. This movement is calculated for all macro blocks in the current frame, which w gives
motion estimation of current frame. Normallyy motion estimation is performed only on luminescence blocks to
improve coding efficiency. Each luminance bllock is matched against candidate blocks in the search area on the
reference frame. These candidate blocks are juust displaced versions of original block . The best cand didate block
which is having lowest distortion is found andd its displacement or motion vector is found .The searrch area for
finding matching block is constrained up to ‘P’ pixels on all four sides of corresponding macro block b in the
previous frame. This ‘P’ is called as search rannge. Larger motion require larger search range and larger is search
range, the process of motion compensation becoomes more computationally expensive [20]. Usually the macro m block
of size16×16 is selected and search range ‘P’ is 7 Pixels on all four sides. This idea is represented in fig.3
3.
 S.M. Kulkarni et al. / Procedia Computer Science 49 (2015) 42 – 49 45

Fig. 2 block-matching Technique Fig.3 search parameter for BMA

The matching of one macro block with another is based on the output of a cost function [15]. that is, cost function
decides matching criteria. The macro block which gives least cost function is the best matching block. There are
various cost functions; Mean absolute difference (MD) is popular and less computationally expensive cost function.
Mean Absolute difference (MAD) is given by equation (1).
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ܰ
௜ୀ଴ ௝ୀ଴

Another cost function is Mean Squared Error (MSE) given by equation (2).
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ܰଶ
௜ୀ଴ ௝ୀ଴
Where N is the size of the macro bock, Cij and Rij are the pixels being compared in current macro block and
reference macro block, respectively.
Peak-Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (PSNR) given by equation (3) which characterizes quality of motion compensated
image [24].

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This is straightforward Block Matching Algorithm which is also called as full-search algorithm. In this process all
candidate blocks in a search window are exhaustively searched to find best matching block. However, this
exhaustive search process is very time consuming and it is not suitable for real time application of video.

5. Three Step Search (TSS) Algorithm

This is fast algorithm for the reduction of computation. The general idea is represented in Fig 4.It starts the
search from centre with the step size S=4. The search parameter value ‘P’ is set to 7, thus it searches eight locations
around the centre with step size ± S. From these eight searched locations, it selects the one having least cost and
makes it new search origin [7]. It then reduces step size by half i.e. S=/2 and repeats slimier search for two more
iterations until the step size S is equal to 1. Thus it finds location with least cost function and the macro block at that
46 S.M. Kulkarni et al. / Procedia Computer Science 49 (2015) 42 – 49

location is the best match. The computation time and number of search points are reduced. For search range ‘P’=7,
full search method requires 225 points whereas three step search need 9+8+8=25 points [17].

Fig. 4. Three Step Search procedure

6. Simulation Results

The proposed algorithm is simulated using the luminance components of two video sequences. The first is ‘Cal
train’ (Frames: 33 Resolution: 400x512) and .Second Video sequence is ‘Chest’ (Frames: 77 Resolution: 256x256).
Both the files are supported by Sun View raster format. The block size is 16x16 pixels and the maximum motion
displacement of search area is± 7 pixels in both horizontal and vertical directions. Minimum absolute difference
(MAD) distortion function is used as the block distortion measure (BDM)[18]Three step search algorithms have
been implemented on video sequences ‘Cal train’ and ‘chest’ with a distance of 2 frames between
current and reference frame. The results are shown in fig.5 and 6.
Fig.5 shows motion estimation coding for “cal train” sequence by using three step search method. Out of 33
frames of ‘cal train’ video sequence we can select any frame as current frame. As shown in Fig.5 (a), frame no .12 is
selected as current frame, hence the previous frame will be frame no.10, because the distance of two frames is kept
between current and previous frame. We can take the distance of one frame also but as the motion of objects in the
frames is not very fast, hence the distance of two frames is selected. Previous frame is shown in Fig.5 (b). The
current frame is divided into number of blocks, for each of block in current frame, the best matching block is found
from previous frame by using three step search technique. Thus Fig. 5(c) shows motion compensated frame. After
this, motion compensated frame is compressed by using Discrete Wavelet transform sub band decomposition
technique. Fig.5 (d) represents DWT image. This image consists of all the four types of coefficients, which are LL,
LH, HL, and HH. As LL band consist of dominant coefficients, hence with LL band coefficients, image can be
reconstructed with fair quality. Fig.5 (e) shows the compressed image, which is obtained by sub band decomposition
up to first level.
 S.M. Kulkarni et al. / Procedia Computer Science 49 (2015) 42 – 49 47

(a)Current frame [frame no.12] (b) Previous frame [Frame no.10]

 
(c) Compensated frame (d) DWT image

(e) Compressed frame



Fig. 5 Motion estimation coding for “cal train” sequence by using TSS (a)Current frame [frame no.12] (b) Previous frame [Frame no.10] (c)
Compensated frame (d) DWT image (e) Compressed frame

The results of three step search technique applied to Chest sequence are shown in Fig. 6.

(a)Current frame [frame no.22] (b) Previous frame [Frame

no.20]

(c) Compensated frame (d) DWT image

48 S.M. Kulkarni et al. / Procedia Computer Science 49 (2015) 42 – 49

(e) Compressed frame

Fig. 6 Motion estimation coding for “chest” sequence by using TSS (a) Current frame [frame no.22] (b) Previous frame [Frame no.20] (c)
Compensated frame (d) DWT image (e) Compressed image

In order to evaluate the performance of three step search technique, it is compared with Exhaustive full search
method. The various performance parameters selected for comparison are PSNR, MSE, CR and BPP [14].
Table-I and II represents performance parameters obtained by both techniques. It is found that there is improvement
in performance with three step search method. The computation cost is also low. In order to find best matching
block, full search method has to search 225 macro blocks, where as three step search requires searching of only 25
macro blocks. Thus three step search technique gives significant improvement over exhaustive full search method
which can be seen from graphical comparison shown in Fig.7.

Table 1
Performance parameter
Sequence: Cal train

Exhaustive Full Three Step

Sr No Parameters
Search Search

1 PSNR 9.9353 8.3452

2 MSE 8.2963-03 8.3090e-03

3 CR 3.6627 4.0341

4 BPP 2.4642 2.1516

TABLE-II
Performance parameters
Video Sequence: Chest

Sr Three Step
Parameters Exhaustive Full Search
No Search

PSNR 22.2156 20.2341

1
3.9012 3.9534
2 MSE
2.9567 3.0925
3 CR

4 BPP 2.9745 2.5869

 S.M. Kulkarni et al. / Procedia Computer Science 49 (2015) 42 – 49 49

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Fig.7 Graphical comparisons between Exhaustive full searcch and three step search techniques
7. Conclusion
In the entire motion based video compression process
p motion estimation is the most computationally ex
xpensive and
time-consuming process. The research in the past decade has focused on reducing both of these sid de effects of
motion estimation. Three step search method of
o Block matching techniques is the most popular and effficient of the
various motion estimation techniques.
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