[Libav-user] Motion estimation : replacement for deprecated AVFrame::motion_val ?

[Camera Man]

On 03/28/2014 12:18 PM, cyril poulet wrote:

> As a matter of fact, I wanted to use them for computer vision, where 
> calculating edge densities and motion estimation are important.
> Now that these are deprecated, the only way is to first decode each 
> frame then re-calculate MVs and DCTs, which is computationnally costly...

You probably don't want to use them for computer vision; They are 
specifically optimized for minimizing visual artifacts on one hand, and 
staying within protocol constraints on the other (e.g. some streams have 
no I-frames but do have guaranteed "frame convergence" - which means the 
motion on those is guaranteed to be "wrong").

It's not that they can't be useful, it's that the MV information is 
"very noisy" compared to what you'd get from computer vision stuff. 
Doing a pyramid Lucas-Kanade (openCV and libccv both have good 
implementations, supposedly) does not require a lot of CPU and provides 
vastly better motion estimation for computer vision.