A coarse-to-fine approach for the generation and tracking of mesh objects from a natural image sequence

A new scheme, which automatically generates a hierarchical mesh from a real image, is proposed. First, three distinct meshes are generated according to a three-layer image pyramid. By eliminating the duplicated mesh nodes between these three meshes, a hierarchical mesh is formed. Because each hierarchy represents the image in different resolutions, this hierarchical structure can achieve progressive coding. Furthermore, to generate a dynamic mesh for an image sequence, this hierarchical structure can help to reduce the computation complexity through the tracking of mesh nodes in the sequence. A method is also proposed to predict the moving direction of mesh nodes and to facilitate the motion estimation.