Conversational Video Communication of H.264/AVC with Region-of-Interest Concern

Although region-of-interest (ROI) based video coding has been well studied for some other video coding standards, its application for H.264 is still of significant interest because there exists a dilemma in the detection of the ROI due to the rate distortion optimization. In this paper, the ROI is first detected by using the direct MAD that is determined without motion information. In this way, the ROI-motion dilemma of H.264/AVC is solved. The rate control scheme with ROI concern can then adjust the quantization parameter (QP) to allocate more bits to the ROI, so the overall subjective visual quality is improved.