An Enhanced Hybrid Content-Based Video Coding Scheme for Low Bit-Rate Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid content-based video coding scheme that encodes arbitrary shaped objects instead of blocks of images. The scheme achieves efficient compression for low bit-rate applications by separating moving objects from stationary background and transmitting the shape, motion and residuals for each segmented object. Furthermore, a new content-based object segmentation algorithm is proposed in the scheme, which does not assume any prior modeling of the objects being segmented. The algorithm is based on a threshold function that calculates block histograms and takes image noise into account. The experimental results show that the scheme proposed outperforms the classical object-based coding methods in terms of PSNR or the average number of bits required for coding a single frame.