Adaptive bi-predictive video coding using temporal extrapolation

In this paper, we propose a new multi-frame bi-predictive motion compensation method using a temporal linear extrapolation technique. Significant coding gain is obtained by the proposed method, especially for fading or dissolving scenes, which are among the most difficult scenes to compress by conventional coding standards. Moreover, stable improved coding efficiency is obtained, using block by block adaptation combined with multiframe averaging prediction. The number of reference frames for the proposed temporal prediction method is limited to two successive frames which are already coded. And therefore only addition, subtraction and shift operation are needed to generate the prediction signal of both extrapolation and averaging. As for encoding, automatic adaptation is performed without scene characteristics detection, such as fade-in, fade-out, and dissolve. Therefore, additional computational power for both encoder and decoder to use the proposed method is very small.