A REGION-BASED ADAPTIVE PERCEPTUAL QUANTIZATION TECHNIQUE FOR MPEG CODER

A region-based adaptive perceptual quantization technique is proposed for video sequence coding, and applied to the MPEG coder. The visibili ty of coding artifacts in a macroblock (MB) is affected by perceptual characteristics of neighboring MBs as well as the MB itself. Therefore spacial and temporal activities of the MB and its surroundings are us ed to decide the quantization scaling factor. In comparison with the a daptive scheme in the encoding algorithm specified in MPEG-2 Test Mode l 5 (TM5), the proposed scheme is proven to improve perceptual quality further in video coding.