Enhanced multigeneration capability for digital HDTV tape recorders

The multigeneration performance of production-quality video compression algorithms has recently become an important area of research. Unfortunately, many existing fixed-rate video compression algorithms do not maintain sufficiently high image quality after multiple stages of generation. A new frequency-based sub-block activity measure is proposed as the basis of a bit allocation scheme for transform-based video coding algorithms. The scheme provides a method for obtaining high multigeneration performance which results in less than 1.0 dB drop in PSNR over 30 generations for both interframe and intraframe coded sequences.