Low-complexity and high-quality frame-skipping transcoder for continuous presence multipoint video conferencing

This paper presents a new frame-skipping transcoding approach for video combiners in multipoint video conferencing. Transcoding is regarded as a process of converting a previously compressed video bitstream into a lower bitrate bitstream. A high transcoding ratio may result in an unacceptable picture quality when the incoming video bitstream is transcoded with the full frame rate. Frame skipping is often used as an efficient scheme to allocate more bits to representative frames, so that an acceptable quality for each frame can be maintained. However, the skipped frame must be decompressed completely, and should act as the reference frame to the nonskipped frame for reconstruction. The newly quantized DCT coefficients of prediction error need to be recomputed for the nonskipped frame with reference to the previous nonskipped frame; this can create an undesirable complexity in the real time application as well as introduce re-encoding error. A new frame-skipping transcoding architecture for improved picture quality and reduced complexity is proposed. The proposed architecture is mainly performed on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain to achieve a low complexity transcoder. It is observed that the re-encoding error is avoided at the frame-skipping transcoder when the strategy of direct summation of DCT coefficients is employed. By using the proposed frame-skipping transcoder and dynamically allocating more frames to the active participants in video combining, we are able to make more uniform peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) performance of the subsequences and the video qualities of the active subsequences can be improved significantly.