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IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Volume 16 Number 1, January 1998

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Object-Oriented H.263 Compatible Video Coding Platform for Conferencing Applications

John Hartung, Arnaud Jacquin, Associate Member, IEEE, James Pawlyk, Jonathan Rosenberg, Member, IEEE, Hiroyuki Okada, and Paul E. Crouch

Page 42.

Abstract:

This paper describes a prototype video coding platformThroughout this paper, the term "platform" is used to actually mean an encoding platform, which produces a compressed bit stream, and a decoding platform which produces decoded images from the bit stream. meant for the conception and testing of multimedia products such as next-generation videophones. The platform is largely based on ITU-T Recommendation H.263, with a number of additional object-oriented quality enhancement features which make it especially well suited for very low bit-rate coding of "head-and-shoulders" video material typical of real-time multimedia applications, video teleconferencing, and video telephony. These features consist of: 1) segmentation into objects of interest, 2) segmentation-based prefiltering, 3) model-assisted rate control, 4) adaptive vector quantization, and finally 5) segmentation-based postfiltering. In the spirit of Recommendation H.263, these enhancements are modular and can be selectively turned on or off, thereby enabling a wide variety of coding modes.

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