Ratecontrolforsceneswithmultiplearbitrarilyshapedvideoobjects.docVIP

Rate Control for Scenes with Multiple Arbitrarily Shaped Video Objects Paulo Nunes, Fernando Pereira( Instituto Superior Técnico - Instituto de Telecomunica??es Av. Rovisco Pais, 1096 Lisboa Codex, Portugal Phone: +351.1.8418460; Fax: +351.1.8418472 E-mail: {Paulo.Nunes, Fernando.Pereira}@lx.it.pt ABSTRACT: This paper considers the problem of bitrate control for object-based video coding, notably for the MPEG-4 video coding scheme. In this context, an algorithm efficiently distributing, for each time instant, the available bitrate among the various (arbitrarily shaped) video objects (VOs) in the scene, is presented. Several criteria for the joint rate control of multiple VO coding are studied and relevant results, for various bitrate conditions, are presented. Introduction With the increasing demand for multimedia technologies providing new and improved functionalities, notably giving the user the capability to interact and manipulate audio-visual (AV) data, new representation methods based on a more natural approach to AV information are needed [[1]]. These needs, and the corresponding requirements, are currently being addressed by MPEG-4 [[2]] which, in contrast with currently available video coding standards, understands a visual scene as a composition of Video Objects (VOs) characterised by their shape, motion, and texture. Each VO is individually coded and corresponds to an elementary bitstream that can be individually accessed and manipulated, while composition information is sent in a separate stream. An instance of a VO at a given time instant is called a Video Object Plane (VOP). With this object-based approach, MPEG-4 may efficiently represent (semantically relevant) AV objects of both synthetic and natural origin, providing mechanisms to interactively access these objects through a wide range of storage and transmission media. The independent representation of each object provides coding flexibility, allowing to privilege the subjectively more importan