New trends in very low bitrate video coding

The interest in very low birate video coding has increased considerably with the creation of new services and applications requiring this class of bitrates in their function. This paper aims in presenting the current problems and requirements, as well as the efforts in very low bitrate video coding. It also provides a number of solutions in order to solve these problems and to fulfill desired requirements in very, low bitrate coding. The main emphasis was given to an approach called “second generation” which has already shown its potential to efficiently code still images at higher compression factors. In particular, three techniques will be discussed in details, because of their ability to successfully achieve very low bitrate video coding with a reasonably good quality. The simulation results obtained by these techniques under the exact same conditions are presented and the merits and drawbacks of each one are pointed out throughout the paper