Scene-context-dependent reference-frame placement for MPEG video coding

Abstract

The MPEG video-compression standard effectively exploits spatial, temporal, and coding redundancies in the algorithm. In its generic form, however, only a minimal amount of scene adaptation is performed. Video can be further compressed by taking advantage of scenes where the temporal statistics allow larger interreference-frame distances. This paper proposes the use of motion analysis (MA) to adapt to scene content. The actual picture type [intracoded (I), predicted (P), or bidirectionally coded (B)] decision is made by examining the accumulation of motion measurements since the last reference frame (either I or P) was labeled. The proposed MA-based adaptive reference frame-placement scheme outperforms the standard fixed-reference frame-placement and adaptive schemes based on histogram of difference. When compared with the standard fixed scheme, depending on the video contents, this proposed algorithm can achieve from 2 to 13.9% savings in bits while maintaining similar quality.