Picture-wise resource allocation in MPEG-2 decoding

Past efforts in lowering the complexity of MPEG-2 decoding through internal scaling or partial-quality decoding have led to video quality degradation. Improvement in degradation of quality can be achieved at the expense of more computation resources. We introduce the notion of picture-type-dependent (PTD) processing where more computational resources are allocated to pictures that contribute more to the overall video quality. Specifically, we advocate decoding and processing more critical pictures in MPEG-2 at higher quality while keeping the resource allocation to non-critical pictures low. Our simulation results show PTD is a very effective way to keep the average resource consumption low while maintaining satisfactory video quality.