Homography-based block motion estimation for video coding of PTZ cameras

•We propose a homography-based search (HBS) algorithm for block motion estimation.•We use optical flow tracking algorithm to obtain homography between two frames.•Adaptive thresholds are adopted in our method to classify different kinds of blocks.

Due to the constrained movement of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras, two frames in the video sequences captured by such cameras can be geometrically related by a relationship (homography). This geometric relationship is helpful for reducing the spatial redundancy in video coding. In this paper, by exploiting the homography between two frames with optical flow tracking algorithm, we propose a novel homography-based search (HBS) algorithm for block motion estimation in coding the sequences captured by PTZ cameras. In addition, adaptive thresholds are adopted in our method to classify different kinds of blocks. Compared with other traditional fast algorithms, the proposed HBS algorithm is proved to be more efficient for the sequences captured by PTZ cameras. And compared to our previous work in ICME (Cui et al., 2011), which only deals with pan-tilt (PT) camera and calculates the homography with mechanical devices, in this extended work we compute the homography by using information on images instead.