Enhanced frame-based video coding to support content-based functionalities

This paper presents the enhanced frame-based video coding scheme that enables some useful content-based functionalities such as user-interactivity with video content, assignment of different quality to video objects, and content-based video search and retrieval. The input video source for the proposed enhanced frame-based video encoder consists of rectangular-size video frames and shapes of arbitrarily-shaped video objects in the frames. The rectangular frames are encoded using a scheme similar to the conventional frame-based video coding and the shapes of video objects are encoded using the contour-based vertex coding. It is possible to achieve several useful content-based functionalities by utilizing the shape information in the bitstream at the cost of a very small overhead of shape bits.