Content-Based Dynamic Threshold Method for Real-Time Keyframe Selecting

This paper presents a new content-based method for real-time keyframe selection in H.264 low delay video coding. Based on dynamic thresholds, it is aimed at improving compression efficiency. It has been trained and tested with real sequences taken from movies and commercials, with very different motion and complexity characteristics, and from low to high bitrates, number of frames per second and formats, with a total of 70000 frames and more than 1500 candidate keyframes. Results are presented achieving up to 2.32 dB average peak signal-to-noise ratio improvement, higher than recent methods in the literature, and even processing time gains, preserving the real-time and low delay conditions in real-time coders.