An efficient motion vector coding scheme based on minimum bitrate prediction

Motion vector coding efficiency is becoming an important issue in low bitrate video coding because of its increasing relative bit portion. This work presents a new motion vector coding technique based on minimum bitrate prediction. In the proposed scheme, a predicted motion vector is chosen from the three causal neighboring motion vectors so that it can produce a minimum bitrate in motion vector difference coding. Then the prediction error, or motion vector difference (MVD), and the mode information (MODE) for determining the predicted motion vector at a decoder are coded and transmitted in order. Sending bits for the MVD ahead of bits for the MODE, the scheme can minimize the bit amount for the MODE by taking advantage of the fact that the minimum bitrate predictor is used for motion vector prediction. Adaptively combining this minimum bitrate prediction scheme with the conventional model-based prediction scheme, more efficient motion vector coding can be achieved. The proposed scheme improves the coding efficiency noticeably for various video sequences.