Low-Complexity MPEG-4 Shape Encoding towards Realtime Object-Based Applications

Abstract

Although frame-based MPEG-4 video services have been successfully deployed since 2000, MPEG-4 video coding is now facing great competition in becoming a dominant player in the market. Object-based coding is one of the key functionalities of MPEG-4 video coding. Realtime object-based video encoding is also important for multimedia broadcasting for the near future. Object-based video services using MPEG-4 have not yet made a successful debut due to several reasons. One of the critical problems is the coding complexity of object-based video coding over frame-based video coding. Since a video object is described with an arbitrary shape, the bitstream contains not only motion and texture data but also shape data. This has introduced additional complexity to the decoder side as well as to the encoder side. In this paper, we have analyzed the current MPEG-4 video encoding tools and proposed efficient coding technologies that reduce the complexity of the encoder. Using the proposed coding schemes, we have obtained a 56 percent reduction in shape-coding complexity over the MPEG-4 video reference software (Microsoft version, 2000 edition).