Rate-Constrained Motion Estimation and Perceptual Coding

In this paper, we propose an optimized motion estimation for perceptual video coding, i.e., a quadtree-based variable size block motion estimation scheme jointly optimize both motion vector coder and residual coder by minimizing the rate subject to a constraint on overall distortion. The residual coder includes perceptual quantization and direct block coding. Since the encoder encodes the residual directly without any transform, it achieves competitive speed with that of MPEG-1 even with the slightly more complicated motion estimation scheme. Experiments demonstrate that the corresponding encoder outperforms the MPEG-1 in terms of both PSNR and visual quality at the same bit rate.