Patent ID: 7623719

Claim:
A video encoder comprising: a wavelet transformer configured to receive and encode an error frame based upon a current frame and predicted frame; a motion predictor to determine the predicted frame; an entropy coder receiving and reduction encoding frames from said wavelet transformer; a rate controller provided with channel bit rates and setting a source rate for the reduction encoding of said entropy coder in accordance with the channel bit rates; and an output buffer connected to a channel to buffer reduction encoded frames from said entropy encoder to be transmitted on the channel; wherein said motion predictor includes a motion estimator, and said motion estimator uses the relative phase difference between Fast Fourier transformed representations of blocks in the current frame and blocks in the reference frame; wherein said rate controller allocates bits to frames by beginning with an assumption equal bit distributions for frame, and then, for each frame n in the sequence: examining the magnitude of motion vector peaks in a frame being evaluated, the peaks being obtained from said motion estimator; calculating an average of the motion vector peaks; maintaining a stored history of the motion vector peaks as an average from a number N of past frames; and setting a bit budget for the frame being evaluated in proportion to a ratio between the magnitude of motion vector peaks and the average of the motion vector peaks.