Shot detection method for low bit-rate H.264 video coding

This paper presents a low-complexity shot detection method for real-time, low bitrate video coding. Aimed at compression efficiency instead of frame indexing or other purposes, it is based on the macroblock intra/inter decision and the use of two thresholds. The first threshold is fixed and the second one is adaptive, providing robust scene change detection on almost all conditions (camera motion, zoom, high motion scenes or low number of frames per second). This method introduces the minimum number of necessary (but expensive in terms of bitrate) refreshing points in the video stream. The algorithm has been implemented and tested in an H.264 coder used to encode QCIF format sequences at a low, constant bitrate, for real-time, low delay communications.