Abstract: A de-interlacing architecture is taught. The de-interlacing architecture adopts a perceptual model to measure membership probabilities for a collection of image samples of an interlaced video source with respect to extracted static, motion, and texture image components of the same collection. The probabilities are used to prioritize contributions from the three image components and produce a progressive video sequence which is a summation of the portions of the aforementioned components. The perceptual model uses a dual-stage motion-based image difficulty measuring scheme to equalize contributions from the three image components in a manner that video artifacts in the output signal are least perceptive. A parameter mapping technique composed of several logic units, a decision function, a weight assignment block, and a look-up table, will be presented to derive the final component weights.

Abstract: A real-time single pass variable bit rate control strategy is provided to achieve variable bit rate (VBR) MPEG-2 encoding in a video compression system. For a sequence of frames, the level of encoding difficulty of a video interval (i.e., a group of pictures (GOP)) is determined by a perceptual rate-quantization ({overscore (C)}-{overscore (Q)}) model. This model assigns a composite ({overscore (C)}-{overscore (Q)}) curve to each video interval from which the number of bits for the video interval is estimated. The estimation relies on a causal predictive model using the parameters obtained from previously encoded video intervals. The R-Q relationship of each picture type is updated and picture bits are assigned, based on the total rate of the video interval under analysis. Robustness of the variable bit rate control strategy is ensured throughout scene transitions and instabilities by applying, for example, a non-linear median filter, and a low pass filter, respectively.

Abstract: Method, system and computer program product are provided for adaptively encoding in hardware, software or a combination thereof a sequence of video frames in real-time. Pre-encode perceptual activity measurement processing is employed to derive statistics on each frame of the sequence of video frames to be encoded. The statistics are used by variable bit rate logic to obtain a number of bits to be used in encoding each frame. The number of bits to be used is provided to a single encoding engine, which encodes the sequence of video frames and produces a constant quality, variable bit rate bitstream output. The pre-encode processing employs a regulator as the global data flow control and synchronization for the encoder. Perceptual activity analysis on each frame of the sequence of video frames can derive information on, for example, shading, scene change, fade, color, motion and/or edge presence within the frame. Voting gives greater weight to the presence of certain characteristics within the frame.