Hybrid resolution switching method for low bit rate video coding

This paper proposes a video coding method using hybrid resolution switching for low bit rate environments. The proposed method encodes I pictures in high resolution and B and P pictures in low resolution. The decimated inter-frame pictures are encoded in the usual H.264/AVC framework, and they are reconstructed to high resolution ones using motion information, interpolation filter, and some residual signals in high resolution. The proposed video coding scheme shows better compression performances in low bit rate environments than the traditional algorithms based on H.264/AVC. The resolution switching method increases the coding efficiency in low bit rates, mainly because the side information of motion estimation is reduced. It is expected that the proposed method can also improve higher bit rate cases, if some parameters optimization and deblocking filter are appropriately applied.