Moving Picture Encoding Apparatus

Abstract

Data of both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 is generated simultaneously with a small circuit scale and a small power consumption. A moving picture encoding apparatus for encoding a moving picture through motion-compensated inter-frame prediction has: a MPEG-2 encoding unit including a motion vector estimator, a frame memory, a forward prediction circuit, a bidirectional prediction circuit, a prediction selection circuit, an intra-frame encoding circuit and a local decoding circuit; a MPEG-4 encoding unit including a frame extraction circuit for extracting a predetermined MPEG-2 frame and a transcoder for encoding the extracted frame; a motion vector calculator calculating a motion vector to be used for MPEG-4 prediction from a motion vector to be used for MPEG-2 prediction; and a prediction mode controller controlling the prediction mode of the MPEG-2 encoding unit in such that the MPEG-2 prediction mode becomes coincident with the MPEG-4 prediction mode.

1 . A moving picture encoding apparatus for encoding a moving picture by utilizing motion-compensated inter-frame prediction, comprising: 
 a first encoding module for encoding the moving picture at a first frame rate and at a first image size;    a second encoding module for encoding the moving picture at a second frame rate and at a second image size;    a motion vector calculation module for calculating a motion vector to be used by said second encoding module from a motion vector to be used by said first encoding module; and    a prediction mode control module for controlling to make a prediction mode of said first encoding module be coincident with a prediction mode of said second encoding module, so that said motion vector calculated by said motion vector calculation module can be used by said second encoding module.    
   
   
       2 . A moving picture encoding method of encoding a moving picture by utilizing motion-compensated inter-frame prediction, comprising: 
 a first encoding step of encoding the moving picture at a first frame rate and at a first image size;    a second encoding step of encoding the moving picture at a second frame rate and at a second image size;    a motion vector calculation step of calculating a motion vector to be used by said second encoding step from a motion vector to be used by said first encoding step; and    a prediction mode control step of controlling to make a prediction mode of said first encoding step be coincident with a prediction mode of said second encoding step, so that said motion vector calculated by said motion vector calculation step can be used by said second encoding step.    
   
   
       3 . A moving picture encoding apparatus for encoding a moving picture by utilizing motion-compensated inter-frame prediction, comprising: 
 a first encoding module for encoding the moving picture at a first frame rate and at a first image size;    a second encoding module for encoding the moving picture at a second frame rate and at a second image size;    a motion vector calculation module for calculating a second motion vector to be used by said second encoding module from a first motion vector to be used by said first encoding module; and    a prediction mode control module for controlling in such a manner that a reference frame of the second motion vector calculated by said motion vector calculation module becomes correspondent with a reference frame of the first motion vector of said second encoding module.