Rectangular Region-based Selective Enhancement (RSE) for MPEG-4 FGS Video

In MPEG-4 FGS (fine granular scalability) video, SE (selective enhancement) function is adopted to enhance the subject quality of the region of interest (ROI). However, it has the problem of excessive bit-rate increase in the enhancement layer. We present a new rectangular region-based SE (RSE) algorithm to significantly reduce the overhead bits resulting from the standard SE. The proposed RSE is based on two new algorithms. The first is to apply the SE function to a rectangular region. By doing so, we can reduce the required bits for describing the selectively enhanced region. The second is to use constrained bit-plane scanning (CBS) to encode bit-planes of the enhancement layer. By using CBS, we can efficiently encode the ALL-ZERO symbols that are generated by applying the SE. It Is shown by simulation that the proposed RSE can provide a good visual quality for the selected rectangular region with significantly reduced overhead bits.