System and method for adaptive field and frame video encoding using rate-distortion characteristics

摘要

A method adaptively encodes a video including a sequence of images, where each image is a picture of two fields. Each image of the video is encoded as a frame and rate-distortion characteristics are extracted from the encoded frames, while concurrently encoding each image of the video as two fields and rate-distortion characteristics are extracted from the fields. A parameter value &lgr; of a cost function is determined according to the extracted rate-distortion characteristics, and a cost function is constructed from the extracted rate-distortion characteristics and the parameter &lgr;. Then, either frame encoding or field encoding is selected for each image depending on a value of the constructed cost function for the image.