Low bit rate ROI based video coding for HDTV aerial surveillance video sequences

For aerial surveillance systems two key features are important. First they have to provide as much resolution as possible, while they secondly should make the video available at a ground station as soon as possible. Recently so called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) got in the focus for surveillance operations with operation targets such as environmental and disaster area monitoring as well as military surveillance. Common transmission channels for UAVs are only available with small bandwidths of a few Mbit/s. In this paper we propose a video codec which is able to provide full HDTV (1920 × 1080 pel) resolution with a bit rate of about 1–3 Mbit/s including moving objects (instead of 8–15 Mbit/s when using the standardized AVC codec). The coding system is based on an AVC video codec which is controlled by ROI detectors. Furthermore we make use of additional Global Motion Compensation (GMC). In a modular concept different Region of Interest (ROI) detectors can be added to adjust the coding system to special operation targets. This paper presents a coding system with two motion-based ROI detectors; one for new area detection (ROI-NA) and another for moving objects (ROI-MO). Our system preserves more details than an AVC coder at the same bit rate of 1.0 Mbit/s for the entire frame.