An active scene analysis-based approach for pseudoconstant bit-rate video coding

Digital video transmission across the network is now widely used in the Internet community. Visual information transmission will no doubt play an important role in a future national information infrastructure (NII). Very often, however, the channel bandwidth is fixed. Therefore, video coding based on an appropriate bit-rate control is a key to the success of accommodating visual communication in NII. In this paper, an extremely efficient rate-control algorithm for pseudoconstant bit rate video coder is proposed. The proposed technique, adaptive scene analysis, intelligently collects required information to obtain estimated bit counts from the previous, present, and future frames. This collected intelligent information is then employed to govern the resource allocation so that better objective quality can be achieved under the bit-rate restriction. Combined with a series of dynamic rate-control schemes, the proposed algorithm demonstrates impressive quality transition between successive frames. In addition, the bit-rate irregularities caused by dramatic scene transition can be smoothed out in a very short period. A comparison with the MPEG-2 Test Model 5 is also presented in this paper