Flexible 3D motion estimation and tracking for multiview image sequence coding 1 1This work was supported by the EU CEC Project ACTS PANORAMA (Package for New Autostereoscopic Multiview Systems and Applications, ACTS project 092) and the Greek Secretariat for Science and Technology Programme YPER

This paper describes a procedure for model-based coding of all channels of a multiview image sequence. The 3D model is initialised by accurate adaptation of a 2D wireframe model to the foreground object of one of the views. The rigid 3D motion is estimated for each triangle, and spatial homogeneity neighbourhood constraints are used to improve the reliability of the estimation efficiency and to smooth the motion field produced. A novel technique is used to estimate flexible motion of the nodes of the wireframe from the rigid 3D motion vectors of the wireframe triangles containing each node. Kalman filtering is used to track both rigid 3D motion of each triangle and flexible deformation of each node of the wireframe. The performance of the resulting 3D flexible motion estimation method is evaluated experimentally.