Macro-Block-Level Selective Background Difference Coding for Surveillance Video

Utilizing the special properties to improve the surveillance video coding efficiency still has much room, although there have been three typical paradigms of methods: object-oriented, background-prediction-based and background-difference-based methods. However, due to the inaccurate foreground segmentation, the low-quality or unclear background frame, and the potential "foreground pollution" phenomenon, there is still much room for improvement. To address this problem, this paper proposes a macro-block-level selective background difference coding method (MSBDC). MSBDC selects the following two ways to encode each macro-block (MB): coding the original MB, and directly coding the difference data between the MB and its corresponding background. MSBDC also features at employs the classification of MBs to facilitate the selection, through which, prediction and motion compensation turns more accurate, both on foreground and background. Results show that, MSBDC significantly decreases the total bitrate and obtains a remarkable performance gain on foreground compared with several state-of-the-art methods.