Noisy motion vector elimination by bi-directional vector-based zero comparison

Network cameras are becoming increasingly popular as surveillance devices. They compress the captured live video data into Motion JPEG and/or MPEG standard formats, and they transmit them through the IP network. MPEG-coded videos contain motion vectors that are useful information for video analysis. However, the motion vectors occurring in homogeneous, low-textured, and line regions tend to be unstable and noisy. To address this problem, the noisy motion vector elimination using vector-based zero comparison and global motion estimation was proposed. In this paper, we extend the existing elimination method by introducing a novel bi-directional vector-based zero comparison to enhance the accuracy of noisy motion vector elimination, and we propose an efficient algorithm for zero comparison. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through several experiments using actual video data acquired by an MPEG video camera.