Comparison of fixed-rate video codecs for wireless videophony

Gain-cost quantised, fixed but arbitrarily programmable rate discrete cosine transformed (DCT) video codecs, vector-quantised (VQ) and quad-tree (QT) coding algorithms are proposed and their video quality, complexity, compression ratio and error resilience trade-offs are comparatively analysed under identical conditions. Our candidate codecs are compared to the standard H261 and MPEG-2 benchmark codecs. The proposed codecs facilitate wireless videophony for quarter common intermediate format (QCIF) video sequences scanned at 10 frames/s at rates around 10 kbps in second-generation mobile systems.