Fast fade-out operation on MPEG video

This paper presents an algorithm for DC-only fade-out operation on MPEG compressed video. The operation has no restriction on picture coding type (I, P or B) or GOP structure. The fade-out process can start at any frame and end at any frame. The DC-only approach assures an independent processing of the frames regardless of the coding dependencies among them. We take advantage of the temporal dependencies inherited from MPEG sequence to process the MPEG stream sequentially. An error-correction scheme is proposed to cope with the accumulated fade-out error due to adaptive quantization employed by MPEG. We also discuss syntax manipulations required to perform the fade-out operation directly in the MPEG domain. Real time fade-out can be achieved.