Video Compression with Intra/Inter Mode Switching and a Dual Frame Buffer

Video codecs that use motion compensation have recently achieved performance improvements from the use of intra/inter mode switching decisions within a rate-distortion framework. A separate development has involved the use of multiple frame prediction, in which more than one past reference frame is available for motion estima-tion. In this paper, we show that using a dual frame buffer (one short term frame and one long term frame available for prediction) together with intra/inter mode switch-ing improves the compression performance of the coder. Also, we improve the mode switching algorithm with the use of half-pel motion vectors.