Object-oriented H.263 compatible video coding platform for conferencing applications

This paper describes a prototype video coding platform(1) meant for the conception and testing of multimedia products such as next-generation videophones, The platform is largely based on ITU-T Recommendation H.263, with a number of additional object-oriented quality enhancement features which make it especially well suited for very low bit-rate coding of "head-and-shoulders" video material typical of real-time multimedia applications, video teleconferencing, and video telephony, These features consist of: 1) segmentation into objects of interest, 2) segmentation-based prefiltering, 3) model-assisted rate control, 4) adaptive vector quantization, and finally 5) segmentation-based postfiltering, In the spirit of Recommendation H.263, these enhancements are modular and can be selectively turned on or off, thereby enabling a wide variety of coding modes.