Motion estimation in image sequences is a fundamental issue in many applications as for instance in artificial vision and three-dimensional scene reconstruction. Among all the existing techniques, we are particularly interested in methods using Gabor filters, which are known to furnish quality results but usually require intensive calculation. A new, fast energy-based method is presented, which combines in a direct manner the energetic responses of Gabor spatio-temporal filters organized in triads. An implementation of this technique on a general purpose Digital Signal Processor (DSP) board is described and the advantages compared with Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) and parallel machine approaches. Our hardware implementation attains a reasonably fast output rate (several images/second) for a better resolution than in the most recent VLSI implementations. These results open interesting perspectives for real-time implementations (such as in mobile robotics) and for the obtention of higher-level results by combining different Gabor filter techniques (for motion, edge detection, texture analysis, etc.).

In this paper, we present a new method to perform Overlapped Block Motion Compensation (OBMC) using the Modified Sigmoid Window (MSW). The proposed MSW-OBMC method uses a variable weighting function to generate a window in order to maximally reduce the blocky artifacts on the edges of the block under consideration. It can be applied in any block partitioned motion compensation scheme. Benchmarked with other relevant methods, the proposed method shows better performance in reducing prediction error energy or blocky artifacts.