—This work presents a low-complexity system implementation of a novel content-adaptive background skipping scheme for region-of-interest (ROI) video coding in mobile video phone applications. To improve the overall perceptual quality, the proposed approach reallocates bits to ROI macroblocks by adaptively skipping the non-ROI and using a weighted bit allocation scheme. The skip decision for the non-ROI is adaptively determined by the content information of the video, such as foreground shape deformation, foreground motion, background motion and background texture complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms traditional schemes by up to 2 dB.