Method and apparatus for producing pseudo-constant bits per picture video bit-streams for low-delay compression system

A frequency domain data management technique for producing pseudo-constant bits per picture compressed video bit-streams in a low delay digital encoding environment is presented. This technique forms a hierarchy among the localized samples of the picture in terms of frequency importance and the picture difficulty after a shot-change is detected. After a shot change, the data management technique implements a series of tasks composed of picture difficulty evaluation, frequency classification, frequency constraining, and zero bytes generation to achieve a pre-determined average picture bits. Further, the low delay encoder uses a unique updating mechanism to encode certain regions of the pictures in intra mode and ensures that the whole picture is updated after a pre-selected number of pictures. The updating method disseminates compression artifacts throughout the video stream by changing the orientation of the intra-coded regions for every picture and scatters intra-picture compression artifacts by spatially decimating the aforementioned regions at different rates.