METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CONTOUR MOTION ESTIMATING A BINARY IMAGE BY USING A WEIGHTED BLOCK MATCH ALGORITHM

A motion estimating method, for use in a motion estimation between a current and a previous frames of a binary video image, wherein the current frame is divided into a plurality of equal sized search blocks, forms a search region corresponding to each search block within the previous frame and a plurality of candidate blocks within the search region, each of the candidate blocks having a same size as the search block, to thereby provide a displacement of each candidate block from the search block as a displacement vector of each candidate block. Thereafter, the method overlaps the search block with each candidate block to thereby determine an unmatched region, a boundary of a matched region and a boundary of the search block and assigns a weight to each of the pixels within the unmatched region on a predetermined basis, wherein the weight may vary from pixel to pixel. Then, the method calculates a weighted error of each candidate block by using the weights and selects a displacement vector which has a minimum error as an optimum motion vector.