Very low bit rate video codec using variable blocksize entropy-constrained residual vector quantization

In this paper we study coding of video sequences at very low bitrates using an entropy-constrained variable block size residual vector quantizer. For a given complexity, it is well understood that structured vector quantizers perform better than unstructured and unconstrained vector quantizers. A combination of structured vector quantizers is used in this paper to encode the video sequences. The proposed codec uses a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) based transform vector quantizer and a variable-rate residual vector quantizer in cascade. The transform-VQ captures the low-frequency information using only a small portion of the bit-budget, while the later stage residual VQ captures the high-frequency information using the remaining bits. A strategy to adaptively refine only areas of high activity using recursive decomposition and selective refinement is used in the later stages. An entropy constraint is used to modify the codebooks to allow better entropy coding of the indices. Performance of the proposed codec is evaluated and compared with the H.263 based codec. Experimental results show not only better quantitative performance but also significantly better perceptual quality.