An adaptive macroblock-group coding algorithm for progressive and interlaced video

The paper proposes a new data structure called macroblock group (MBG). The MBG structure unifies the progressive and interlaced date into one general data format, thus enables a unifying process framework to conduct the progressive and interlaced video coding. Upon the new data structure, an adaptive MBG coding (A-MBG) method undertakes two-stage coding process, and it can well use the calculated and estimated encoding cost to select the best one among the MBG types, thus can finely adapt to the local contents of the pictures. The experiments are taken in comparison with the newly finalized H.264 standard. A-MBG shows an outperforming result to that of MBAFF in coding efficiency. In addition, because of using the same structure for both progressive and interlaced video, the structure complexity of A-MBG would be lower than that of MBAFF.