Multidimensional bit rate control for video communication

In conventional bit rate control schemes, the buffer level is controlled by adjusting the quantization step size while the frame rate and spatial resolution chosen for coding are fixed throughout the coding process. In this paper, we consider a more general Multidimensional (M-D) bit rate control where the frame rate, spatial resolution and quantization step size are jointly adapted for buffer control. In the M-D bit rate control setting, the problem is to decide which frames to code (and which frames to skip) along with the spatial resolution and the quantization step size to use for each coded frame. Given a finite set of operating points on a M-D grid, we formulate the optimal solution of the M-D buffer-constrained allocation problem. The formulation allows a skipped frame to be reconstructed from one coded frame using any temporal interpolation method. A dynamic programming algorithm is presented to obtain an optimal solution for the case of intraframe coding which is a special case of dependent coding. We experiment with both zero-order hold and motion-compensated temporal interpolation. Operational rate-distortion (R-D) bounds are illustrated for both the M-D and conventional bit rate control approaches. Our focus is on very low bit rate applications where a significant delay is tolerable.