Real-time software-based video coder for multimedia communication systems

A novel software-based video compression algorithm, the Popular Video Coder (PVC), is presented in this paper, and a video phone system, the Popular Phone, is also implemented based on the PVC. The PVC simplifies the traditional video coder by removing the transform and the motion estimation parts and modifies the quantizer and entropy coder. Two novel coding algorithms, the adaptive quantizer and the modified windowed Huffman-like coder, are used in the PVC to encode the video data with a quality picture at a high compression ratio. The video quality of the proposed coder is as good as that of the MPEG coder when the input is a low-resolution and slow-motion video, and the computational complexity of the PVC is much lower than that of the Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG). Since no compression hardware is needed for the PVC to encode and decode video data, the cost and complexity of developing multimedia applications, such as video phone and multimedia e-mail systems, can be greatly reduced. Furthermore, some networking issues, such as error control and flow control, are discussed in connection with applying the PVC to implement the Popular Phone.