Investigation of Distortion-Constrained Video Encoding and its Application to Visual Saliency Guided Compression

We present a novel macroblock mode decision approach for video encoder. It aims at minimizing the rate given a certain distortion constraint. Motivated by the fact that humans perceive only a small area around the eye-fixation point very clearly, the presented mode decision algorithm is designed to tolerate a certain amount of distortion depending on the visual importance of a region within a frame. Furthermore, the proposed approach is extended by a quantizer modification scheme. With this, improvements of up to 1 dB in terms of eye-tracking-weighted PSNR compared to conventional rate-distortion optimization are possible.