Efficient MPEG-2 encoding of interlaced video

The MPEG-2 standard provides the enabling technology for a wide variety of applications such as satellite broadcasting and CATV. We present an MPEG-2-compliant interlaced video encoder that employs an efficient macroblock coding mode selection method, a simple motion vector prediction technique, and a computation constrained motion vector search algorithm. The macroblock coding mode is selected based on a rate-distortion criterion. However, a computational analysis as well as predictive and statistical modelling techniques are introduced that lead to substantially better computation-performance trade-offs. The proposed MPEG-2 video encoder is shown experimentally to outperform the MPEG-2 TM5 encoder, expressed in a 15–60% reduction in bit rate and/or a 1.5–2.5 dB increase in objective quality. Besides its compression advantage, our encoder requires less than 0.5% of the number of computations required by the TM5.