Bi-level video: Video communication at very low bit rates

The rapid development of wired and wireless networks tremendously facilitates communications between people. However, most of the current wireless networks still work in low bandwidths, and mobile devices still suffer from weak computational power, short battery lifetime and limited display capability. We developed a very low bit-level video coding technique, which can be used in video communications almost anywhere, anytime on any device. The spirit of this method is that rather than giving highest priority to the "basic colors" of an image as in conventional DCT-based compression methods, we give preference to the outline features of scenes when we have limited bandwidths. These features can be represented by bi-level image sequences that are converted from gray-scale image sequences. By analyzing the temporal correlation between successive frames and flexibilities in the scene presentation using bi-level images, we achieve very high ratios with our bi-level video compression scheme. Experiments show that in low bandwidths, our method provides clearer shape, smoother motion, shorter initial latency and much cheaper computational cost than do DCT-based methods. Our method is especially suitable for small mobile devices such as handheld PCs, palm-size PCs and mobile phones that possess small display screens and light computational power, and work in low bandwidth wireless networks. We have built PC and Pocket PC versions of bi-level video phone systems, which typically provide QCIF-size video with a frame rate of 5-15 fps for a 9.6 Kbps bandwidth.