Rate-distortion based video compression

by Guido M. Schuster

The book contains a review chapter on video compression, a background chapter on optimal bit allocation and the necessary mathematical tools, such as the Lagrangian multiplier method and Dynamic Programming. These two introductory chapters make the book self-contained and a fast way of entering this exciting field. Rate-Distortion Based Video Compression establishes a general theory for the optimal bit allocation among dependent quantizers. The minimum total (average) distortion and the minimum maximum distortion cases are discussed. This theory is then used to design efficient motion estimation schemes, video compression schemes and object boundary encoding schemes. For the motion estimation schemes, the theory is used to optimally trade the reduction of energy in the displaced frame difference (DFD) for the increase in the rate required to encode the displacement vector field (DVF). These optimal motion estimators are then used to formulate video compression schemes which achieve an