Adaptive frame skipping based on spatio-temporal complexity for low bit-rate video coding

Conventional rate control schemes focus on the adjustment of quantization values to retain a certain buffer level, and buffer adaptive frame skippings are used to avoid buffer overflow at low bit-rates. In this paper, an adaptive frame-skipping scheme is proposed to achieve the balance between spatial and temporal quality, and to maintain the buffer level. The occurrence of frame skipping is jointly dependent on the temporal and spatial complexity of the video, and on the fullness of the buffer. This helps to achieve a balanced spatial and temporal quality and to enhance the overall perceptual quality. Experimental results show that the new scheme is simple but very effective, with large average PSNR gains and consistently improved visual quality, and the improvement in perceptual quality is much significant than that in average PSNRs. (C) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.