Most standard video compression schemes such as H.264/AVC involve a high
complexity encoder with a block motion estimation (ME) engine. However, in
applications such as video reconnaissance and surveillance using UAVs, a low
complexity video encoder is needed but the motion is primarily global and known
to the encoder and decoder. We investigate a low complexity encoder with global
motion based frame prediction, no block ME, and spectral entropy bit allocation.
For UAV-type videos, this encoder outperforms a baseline H.264 encoder with ME
block size 8x8. Furthermore, for the standard “Hall Monitor” test sequence, the
proposed low complexity encoder combined with a low complexity decoder
outperforms the low complexity encoder/high complexity decoder Wyner-Ziv based
DISCOVER codec.