Region-of-Interest video coding by fuzzy control for H.263+ standard

This paper proposes an Region-of-Interest(ROI) video coding algorithm based on H.263+. The ability to give higher priority to ROI is the emerging functionality for video coding nowadays. In most videoconferencing and videophony, most existing compression schemes treat the entire image uniformly. However, the background is much less critical than the foreground, i.e., human face, moving objects, etc., for communication. A region-based video codec based on the H.263+ with the optional mode of modified quantization is set up. A new algorithm based on TMN8 utilizes a fuzzy logic control method to give adaptively weighted factors to each macroblock(MB) and allocate different bits to each MB according to the complexity and the variance variation in the rate-and-distortion model. From experimental results, the proposed method can significantly improve the quality at ROI and multiple ROI functionality also has been implemented. Our method is suitable for real time videoconferencing.