A spatial and temporal motion vector coding algorithm for low-bit-rate video coding

At low bit-rates, the coding quality of video is highly dependent on the performance of motion estimation/compensation. One way to obtain reasonable temporal prediction performance is to find an efficient motion coding scheme such that motion information can be compactly represented. To this end, this paper presents a spatial-temporal motion vector coding scheme. While the proposed motion vector coding approach adopts a scheme similar to H.263 with the syntax-based arithmetic coding mode turned on, i.e., spatial differential coding with arithmetic coding, the performance improvements over conventional motion vector coding approaches are made possible by exploiting temporal correlation between motion information of successive frames when choosing probability functions for the arithmetic coder. To obtain the performance gain provided by this coding framework, a rate-distortion motion estimation algorithm that employs delay-decision techniques is developed.