Joint Spatial-Temporal Quality Improvement Scheme for H.264 Low Bit Rate Video Coding via Adaptive Frameskip

• Ziguan Cui,
• Zongliang Gan,
• Xiuchang Zhu,

Vol. 6, No. 1, January 29, 2012
10.3837/tiis.2012.01.024, Download Paper (Free):

• Video coding
• H.264
• RC
• adaptive frame skipping
• perceptual quality

Abstract

Conventional rate control (RC) schemes for H.264 video coding usually regulate output bit rate to match channel bandwidth by adjusting quantization parameter (QP) at fixed full frame rate, and the passive frame skipping to avoid buffer overflow usually occurs when scene changes or high motions exist in video sequences especially at low bit rate, which degrades spatial-temporal quality and causes jerky effect. In this paper, an active content adaptive frame skipping scheme is proposed instead of passive methods, which skips subjectively trivial frames by structural similarity (SSIM) measurement between the original frame and the interpolated frame via motion vector (MV) copy scheme. The saved bits from skipped frames are allocated to coded key ones to enhance their spatial quality, and the skipped frames are well recovered based on MV copy scheme from adjacent key ones at the decoder side to maintain constant frame rate. Experimental results show that the proposed active SSIM-based frameskip scheme acquires better and more consistent spatial-temporal quality both in objective (PSNR) and subjective (SSIM) sense with low complexity compared to classic fixed frame rate control method JVT-G012 and prior objective metric based frameskip method.

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