Abstract: A method and apparatus for indirect quantitative assessment or determination and modelling of the depth dimension of moving objects in signal streams where the depth information is not directly avaible, but where occlusion information can be derived.

Abstract: The present invention concerns improved motion estimation in signal records.

Abstract: The invention discloses an apparatus for decoding a video sequence, compressed according to a known data modeling method suitable for transmission or storage, into decompressed frames, suitable for viewing, the data model comprising a plurality of spatial intensity changes patterns, called intensity loads, a plurality of spatial address change patterns, called address loads, and a plurality of values, called scores, specifying for each frame how much of each load should be present. Each of the loads includes respective hardware components for storing and processing it. The respective components are connected in a pipeline consisting of parallel synchronous data paths, through which pipeline the intermediate image and motion field are continuously transmitted.

Abstract: A modelling technique for compact representation of related images is disclosed. The images are described as collections of spatial segments, each of which is modelled with a multivariate bi-linear model in the intensity and similarity also in the address domain. As applied to digitized video sequences, each bi-linear model consists of a set of spatial change patterns relative to a reference and a set of corresponding temporal scores that indicate how much of each change pattern is present in each image. Both the structure of the encoding and decoding algorithms and also the data structure of the compact representation are disclosed. This multi-domain modelling allows efficient data representation by removal of redundancies in the spatial, temporal and other domains.