Adaptive Field/Frame Selection for High Compression Coding

In practice, interlaced video sequences are typically coded with either a frame-only or fieldonly structure, irrespective of the content. However, coding in this way will not provide the best coding efficiency. This paper proposes an adaptive picture-level field/frame coding scheme with corresponding rate control. First, a two-pass field/frame decision scheme is proposed. In this scheme, we formulate the field/frame decision as a constrained optimization problem. The actual rate and distortion data are collected and the optimal picture-level coding decision is determined based on this data. An effective rate control for the proposed two-pass algorithm is also presented. However, since the complexity of the two-pass scheme is relatively large since motion estimation must be performed for both the frame-based picture and the field-based picture, we also propose a one-pass field/frame decision scheme. This one-pass scheme calculates the variance of each macroblock in a field and estimates the correlation between two fields. Based on the correlation, a decision to code the picture as a frame or as fields is made. A rate control method for the proposed one-pass scheme is also presented. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms frame-only and field-only coding for several sequences coded at a wide range of bit-rates, and the proposed one-pass scheme obtains similar performance as the proposed two-pass scheme. This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America. All rights reserved. Copyright c ©Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America, 2003 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Published in SPIE Conf. on Image and Video Communications and Processing, Jan 2003. Adaptive Field/Frame Selection for High Compression Coding Xi Min Zhang , Anthony Vetro , Huifang Sun , Yun Q. Shi Department of ECE, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ MERL Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ ABSTRACT In practice, interlaced video sequences are typically coded with either a frame-only or field-only structure, irrespective of the content. However, coding in this way will not provide the best coding efficiency. This paper proposes an adaptive picturelevel field/frame coding scheme with corresponding rate control. First, a two-pass field/frame decision scheme is proposed. In this scheme, we formulate the field/frame decision as a constrained optimization problem. The actual rate and distortion data are collected and the optimal picture-level coding decision is determined based on this data. An effective rate control for the proposed two-pass algorithm is also presented. However, since the complexity of the two-pass scheme is relatively large since motion estimation must be performed for both the frame-based picture and the field-based picture, we also propose a one-pass field/frame decision scheme. This one-pass scheme calculates the variance of each macroblock in a field and estimates the correlation between two fields. Based on the correlation, a decision to code the picture as a frame or as fields is made. A rate control method for the proposed one-pass scheme is also presented. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms frame-only and field-only coding for several sequences coded at a wide range of bit-rates, and the proposed one-pass scheme obtains similar performance as the proposed two-pass scheme.