Joint optimal object shape estimation and encoding

A major problem in object oriented video coding and MPEG-4 is the encoding of object boundaries. In our previous work, we presented efficient methods for the lossy encoding of object boundaries which were optimal in the rate distortion sense. In this paper, we extend our work to utilize both the original image and an initial segmentation to obtain the optimal shape representation based on the criteria we impose. The boundary detection and encoding problems are considered simultaneously. If there is low confidence on the location of the boundary, a large approximation error is allowed when encoding the boundary and vide versa. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.