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Region-of-interest (ROI) determination is very important for video processing and it is desirable to find a simple method to identify the ROl. Along this direction, this paper investigates a user attention model based on visual rhythm analysis for automatic determination of ROl in a video. The visual rhythm, which is an abstraction of a video, is a thumbnail version of a video by a 2-D image that captures the temporal information of a video sequence. Four sampling lines, including diagonal, anti- diagonal, vertical, and horizontal lines, are employed to obtain four visual rhythm maps in order to analyze the location of the ROl from video data. Via the variation on visual rhythms, object and camera motions can be efficiently distinguished. As for hardware design consideration, the proposed scheme can accurately extract ROl with very low computational complexity for real-time applications. The promising results from the experiments demonstrate that the moving object is effectively and efficiently extracted. Finally, we present a way to use flexible macroblock ordering in combination with ROl determination as a preprocessing step for H.264/AVC video coding, and experimental results show the quality of ROl regions is significantly enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]