A fast frame type selection technique for very low bit rate coding using MPEG-1

Abstract

Abstract In this paper we present an adaptive frame type selection algorithm for motion compensation, which is applied to a low bit rate video coding using MPEG-1. In the adaptive scheme, the number of reference frames for motion compensation is determined by a scene change detection algorithm using temporal segmentation. To choose for the distance measure for the temporal segmentation, three histogram-based measures and one variance-based measure were tested and compared. The reference frame positions may be determined by an exhaustive search algorithm which is computationally complex. The complexity can be reduced by using a binary search algorithm which exploits the monotonicity of the distance measure with respect to the reference frame interval. The target bit allocation for each picture type in a group of pictures is adjusted to allow a variable number of reference frames with the constraint of constant channel bit rate. Simulation results show that the adaptive reference frame positioning scheme compares favorably with the fixed positioning scheme at the bit rates of 64 kb/s and 14.4 kb/s.