Threshold-free pattern-based low bit rate video coding

Pattern-based video coding (PVC) has already established its superiority over recent video coding standard H.264, at low bit rate because of an extra pattern-mode to segment out the arbitrary shape of the moving region within the macroblock (MB). To determine the pattern-mode, the PVC however uses three thresholds to reduce the number of MBs coded using the pattern- mode. By setting these content-sensitive thresholds to any predefined values, the technique risks ignoring some MBs that would otherwise be selected by the rate-distortion optimization function for this mode. Consequently, the ultimate achievable performance is sacrificed to save motion estimation times. In this paper, a novel PVC scheme is proposed by removing all thresholds to determine this mode and hence more efficient performance is achieved without knowing the content of the video sequences. To keep computational complexity in check, pattern motion is approximated from the motion vector of the MB. In addition, efficient pattern similarity metric and new Lagrangian multipliers are also developed. The experimental results confirm that this new scheme improves the image quality by at least 0.5 dB and 1.0 dB compared to the existing PVC and the H.264 respectively.