Joint Adaptive Background Skipping and Weighted Bit Allocation for Wireless Video Telephony

In this paper, we propose a novel region-of-interest (ROI) video coding algorithm for wireless video telephony applications. In order to improve the visual quality of the ROI, the proposed approach reallocates bits from non-ROI macroblocks to ROI by adaptively skipping non-ROI and using an optimized weighted bit allocation scheme to bias the bit allocation. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first effort to develop an optimized rho-domain bit allocation scheme for ROI video coding. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other methods by up to 2 dB