Temporally adaptive motion interpolation exploiting temporal masking in visual perception

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel technique to dynamically adapt motion interpolation structures by temporal segmentation. The number of reference frames and the intervals between them are adjusted according to the temporal variation of the input video. Bit-rate control for this dynamic group of pictures (GOP) structure is achieved by taking advantage of temporal masking in human vision. Constant picture quality can be obtained by variable-bit-rate coding using this approach. Further improvement can be made when the intervals between reference frames are chosen by minimizing a measure of the coding difficulty of a GOP. Advantages for low bit-rate coding and implications for variable-bit-rate coding are discussed. Simulations on test video are presented for various GOP structures and temporal segmentation methods, and the results compare favorably with those for conventional fixed GOP structures.