Improvements of Transform Coding Algorithm for Motion-Compensated Interframe Prediction Errors-DCT/SQ Coding

A new hybrid coding method for transmitting videoconferencing images at a bit rate 384 kbits/s is proposed. Considering the characteristics of motion-compensated interframe prediction errors for typical videoconferencing scenes, a filter is introduced to separate pulsive components on which conventional discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding method does not work well. These separated pulsive components are coded by using scalar quantization (SQ). The remainder are DCT coded. For DCT coefficients, an adaptive coding method based on the classification of DCT coefficients is applied in order to improve the coding performance. Since the proposed method employs both DCT coding and SQ of prediction errors, it is named "DCT/SQ coding method." Experimental results show that the DCT/SQ coding method is effective to reduce so-called mosquito effects, and thus it can improve the quality of decoded images.     

Selective Disparity Estimation and Variable Size Motion Estimation Based on Motion Homogeneity for Multi-View Coding

Multi-view video coding (MVC) is an ongoing standard in which variable size disparity estimation (DE) and motion estimation (ME) are both employed to select the best coding mode for each macroblock (MB). This technique achieves the highest possible coding efficiency, but it results in extremely large encoding time which obstructs it from practical use. In this paper, a fast DE and ME algorithm based on motion homogeneity is proposed to reduce MVC computational complexity. The basic idea of the method is to utilize the spatial property of motion field in prediction where DE and variable size ME are needed, and only in these regions DE and variable size ME are enabled. The motion field is generated by the corresponding motion vectors (MVs) in spatial window. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can save 63% average computational complexity, with negligible loss of coding efficiency.      

一种用于视频对象编码的运动模式识别算法

针对目前视频编码中广泛采用的块匹配运动估计补偿(ME+MC)算法的不足,提出一种基于自组织映射(SOM)的运动模式识别(MPR)算法,并将其应用于会议电视的视频对象编码中.为了改善SOM算法的性能,提出一种频率敏感的自组织映射算法(FSOM).实验表明,与ME+MC算法相比,FSOM-MPR算法具有更好的预测编码性能.对Claire视频测试序列,当压缩比为170∶1时,重建视频图像的平均峰值信噪比(PSNR)有2.7dB的改善.     

Hybrid picture coding with wavelet transform and overlappedmotion-compensated interframe prediction coding

A novel video coding scheme using an orthonormal wavelet transform is proposed. The wavelet transform is used in a motion compensated interframe coder in which a blockless motion compensation technique is employed to increase efficiency of wavelet transform coding. A new scanning method for wavelet coefficients is also proposed which is rather different from subband coding. Simulation work is carried out to evaluate the proposed coding method. Significant improvement in subjective quality is obtained over that obtained with conventional hybrid coding methods that use blockwise motion compensation and DCT. Some improvement has also been realized in the signal to noise ratio. Although wavelet coding is still in its early stages of development, it appears to hold great promise for motion picture coding     

Entropy Coding for a Hybrid Scheme with Motion Compensation in Subprimary Rate Video Transmission

Entropy coding has been investigated for motion-compensated interframe (MC) prediction followed by two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (DCT) for prediction error. In particular, variable word length coding methods for motion vector and transform coefficients have been discussed assuming low bit rate such as 384 kbits/s for transmission of videoconference sequences. For motion vector information, it is advantageous to employ a one-dimensional code set common to both horizontal and vertical components of motion vectors. The code set can be obtained using a combined distribution of the two components. In order to encode transform coefficients, different methods are applied to significant and insignificant blocks. Run-length coding is adequate for representing clusters of insignificant blocks. In encoding transform coefficients in significant blocks, a zone coding method which encodes transform coefficients within a minimum area enclosing all nonzero coefficients is suitable. Simulation of video sequences shows that a combination of the coding methods described here can achieve high coding efficiency for videoconference sequences.     

Variable temporal-length 3-D discrete cosine transform coding

Three-dimensional discrete cosine transform (3-D DCT) coding has the advantage of reducing the interframe redundancy among a number of consecutive frames, while the motion compensation technique can only reduce the redundancy of at most two frames. However, the performance of the 3-D DCT coding will be degraded for complex scenes with a greater amount of motion. This paper presents a 3-D DCT coding with a variable temporal length that is determined by the scene change detector. Our idea is to let the motion activity in each block be very low, while the efficiency of the 3-D DCT coding could be increased. Experimental results show that this technique is indeed very efficient. The present approach has substantial improvement over the conventional fixed-length 3-D DCT coding and is also better than that of the Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG) coding.     

Rate distortion optimization for H.264 interframe coding: a general framework and algorithms.

Rate distortion (RD) optimization for H.264 interframe coding with complete baseline decoding compatibility is investigated on a frame basis. Using soft decision quantization (SDQ) rather than the standard hard decision quantization, we first establish a general framework in which motion estimation, quantization, and entropy coding (in H.264) for the current frame can be jointly designed to minimize a true RD cost given previously coded reference frames. We then propose three RD optimization algorithms--a graph-based algorithm for near optimal SDQ in H.264 baseline encoding given motion estimation and quantization step sizes, an algorithm for near optimal residual coding in H.264 baseline encoding given motion estimation, and an iterative overall algorithm to optimize H.264 baseline encoding for each individual frame given previously coded reference frames-with them embedded in the indicated order. The graph-based algorithm for near optimal SDQ is the core; given motion estimation and quantization step sizes, it is guaranteed to perform optimal SDQ if the weak adjacent block dependency utilized in the context adaptive variable length coding of H.264 is ignored for optimization. The proposed algorithms have been implemented based on the reference encoder JM82 of H.264 with complete compatibility to the baseline profile. Experiments show that for a set of typical video testing sequences, the graph-based algorithm for near optimal SDQ, the algorithm for near optimal residual coding, and the overall algorithm achieve on average, 6%, 8%, and 12%, respectively, rate reduction at the same PSNR (ranging from 30 to 38 dB) when compared with the RD optimization method implemented in the H.264 reference software.     

Motion estimation using low-bit oriented edge image for DCT-basedvideo compression

A novel block-based motion estimation algorithm using a low-bit resolution oriented edge image (LROEI) is proposed. The algorithm produces difference blocks with little texture for DCT coding and enhances the encoding efficiency. Simulation based on a hierarchical subsampling telescope search confirms that the quality of the LROEI is superior to that of luminance image compared with HSTS using an 8 bit luminance image. The operational loads are also reduced to 75 or 50% without quality degradation     

一种提高H.261编码性能的实现方法

研究表明采用最小均方误差或绝对误差准则的块匹配运动估值算法对H.261编码器来说不是最好的。本文提出了一种改进的块匹配运动估值算法。它所采用的准则不仅考虑了预测误差能量的大小,还考虑了运动矢量信息以及帧间预测误差的编码比特数目的多少.实验结果表明新的准则能够显著地改善H.261的编码性能。     

On the adaptive three-dimensional transform coding techniques for moving images

In this paper, an adaptive three-dimensional transform coding technique based on the 3-D discrete cosine transform (DCT) for removing the temporal correlation is proposed. Because of the nonstationary nature of the image data, the energy distribution in a 3-D DCT block varies along the vertical, horizontal and temporal directions. Thus, adaptive schemes, such as the 3-D classification, the classified linear scanning technique and the VLC table selection scheme, are used to take local variations into account. Also, in our approach, a hybrid technique, which adaptively combines relatively simple inter-frame coding with intra-frame coding, is presented. Through intensive computer simulations, the performance of the proposed 3-D transform coding technique is evaluated on several well-known moving sequences. The results show that, especially for moving sequences containing slow or moderate motion, the proposed technique provides an improved performance over the scheme with motion compensation (CCITT, 1989) at rates above 0.5 b/pixel (bpp), and a good visual quality of the reconstructed images is also obtained. Thus, the proposed 3-D transform coding technique is believed to be a good candidate for the digital VCR, since motion compensation is not required in the proposed 3-D coding technique.     

一种新的自适应二值运动估计算法

利用增强位平面的二值特性和运动矢量场自适应思想,提出了一种新的自适应二值运动估计算法.算法在图像的位平面中完成运动矢量的搜索;匹配时对静止块进行判定直接中止搜索,同时采用了起始点预测和运动类型判定,自适应使用LDSP和SDSP模板进行搜索.实验结果表明:该算法的搜索速度优于绝大多数现有的运动估计算法,且预测精度接近于FS算法.     

Flash scene video coding using weighted prediction

A novel algorithm for coding flash scenes is proposed. In principle, flash scenes can be detected by analyzing the histogram differences between frames. The proposed algorithm then suggests an adaptive coding order technique for increasing the efficiency of video coding by taking account of characteristics of flash scenes in video contents. The use of adaptive coding technique also benefits to enhance the accuracy of derived motion vectors for determination of weighting parameter sets. Experimental results show that a significant improvement of coding performance in terms of bitrate and PSNR can be achieved in comparison with the conventional weighted prediction algorithms.     

Fast motion and disparity estimation for HEVC based 3D video coding

The emerging international standard for high efficiency video coding (HEVC) based 3D video coding (3D-HEVC) is an extension of HEVC. In the test model of 3D-HEVC, variable size motion estimation (ME) and disparity estimation (DE) are both employed to select the best coding mode for each treeblock in the encoding process. This technique achieves the highest possible coding efficiency, but it brings extremely high computational complexity which limits 3D-HEVC from practical applications. In this paper, a fast ME/DE algorithm based on inter-view and spatial correlations is proposed to reduce 3D-HEVC computational complexity. Since the multi-view videos represent the same scene with similar characteristic, there is a high correlation among the coding information from inter-view prediction. Besides, the homogeneous regions in texture video have a strong spatial correlation, and thus spatially neighboring treeblocks have similar coding information. Therefore, we can determine ME search range and skip some specific ME and DE rarely used in the previously coded view frames and spatially neighboring coding unit. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce computational complexity of 3D-HEVC encoding while maintaining almost the same rate-distortion performance.     

Predictive RD optimized motion estimation for very low bit-ratevideo coding

Predictive rate-distortion (RD) optimized motion estimation techniques are studied and developed for very low bit-rate video coding. Four types of predictors are studied: mean, weighted mean, median, and statistical mean. The weighted mean is obtained using conventional linear prediction techniques. The statistical mean is obtained using a finite-state machine modeling method based on dynamic vector quantization. By employing prediction, the motion vector search can then be constrained to a small area. The effective search area is reduced further by varying its size based on the local statistics of the motion field, through using a Lagrangian as the search matching measure and imposing probabilistic models during the search process. The proposed motion estimation techniques are analyzed within a simple DCT-based video coding framework, where an RD criterion is used for alternating among three coding modes for each 8×8 block: motion only, motion-compensated prediction and DCT, and intra-DCT. Experimental results indicate that our techniques yield very good computation-performance tradeoffs. When such techniques are applied to an RD optimized H.263 framework at very low bit rates, the resulting H.263 compliant video coder is shown to outperform the H.263 TMN5 coder in terms of compression performance and computations simultaneously     

Iterative search strategy with selective bi-directional prediction for low complexity multiview video coding

The multiview video coding (MVC) extension of H.264/AVC is the emerging standard for compression of impressive 3D and free-viewpoint video. The coding structure in MVC adopts motion and disparity estimation to exploit temporal and inter-view dependencies in MVC. It results in a considerable increase in encoding complexity. Most of the computational burden comes from uni-directional and bi-directional prediction. In this paper, an iterative search strategy is designed to speed up the uni-directional prediction in MVC. It can work with an adaptive search range adjustment through a confidence measure of a loop constraint to obtain both motion and disparity vectors jointly. Furthermore, a selective bi-directional prediction algorithm is proposed to enhance the coding performance by analyzing the statistical characteristics of bi-directional prediction in MVC. Experimental results demonstrate that, by using the proposed fast search, the temporal and inter-view redundancies of multiview video can be eliminated sufficiently with low complexity.     

基于运动矢量插值的运动补偿算法

本文首先研究了相关性约束运动估值算法,然后提出了基于运动矢量插值的运动估值算法,实验表明新算法的预测性能明显比传统块匹配运动估值算法(BMA)好,而且预测图象的主观质量得到显著改善。     

A Video Coding Scheme Based on Joint Spatiotemporal and Adaptive Prediction

We propose a video coding scheme that departs from traditional motion estimation/DCT frameworks and instead uses Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT)/Joint spatiotemporal prediction framework. In particular, a novel approach that performs joint spatial and temporal prediction simultaneously is introduced. It bypasses the complex H.26x interframe techniques and it is less computationally intensive. Because of the advantage of the effective joint prediction and the image-dependent color space transformation (KLT), the proposed approach is demonstrated experimentally to consistently lead to improved video quality, and in many cases to better compression rates and improved computational speed.     

极低码率视频编码中运动估值技术的研究

本文针对Ｈ．２６３编码系统块匹配运动估值技术中出现的一些影响图像质量和系统编码效率的问题,提出了一种新的宏块分区运动估算算法。计算模块实验表明,采用新的算法较好地提高系统编码效率和图像质量。     

Selective VS-MRF-ME and intra coding in H.264 based on spatiotemporal continuity of motion field

The new video coding standard, H.264 uses variable size motion estimation (VS-ME), multiple reference frame motion estimation (MRF-ME) and spatial-based intra prediction with selectable block size in inter frame coding. These tools have achieved significant coding efficiency compared to coding a macroblock (MB) only based on motion-compensation in regular size with single reference frame. However, these new features also give rise to an exhaustive computation in the coding procedure since there are so many combinations of coding modes and reference frames to be tried. In this paper, a fast motion estimation algorithm based on the selective VS-MRF-ME and intra prediction is proposed to reduce H.264 coding computational complexity. The basic idea of the method is to utilize the spatiotemporal property of motion field in predicting where VS-MRF-ME and intra prediction are needed, and only in these regions VS-MRF-ME and intra coding are enabled. The motion field is generated by motion vectors from 16×16 motion estimation on the nearest reference frame. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can save 50% computational complexity on average, with negligible loss of coding efficiency.     

Postprocessing of images by filtering the unmasked coding noise

This paper presents a methodology for the restoration of the visual quality of still images affected by coding noise. This quality restoration is achieved only by considering the additive coding noise and is therefore limited to an adaptive postprocessing filtering. It is based on a model of the human visual system that considers the relationship between visual stimuli and their visibility. This phenomenon known as masking is used as a criterion for the locally adaptive filtering design. An image transformation that yields visual stimuli tuned to the frequency and orientation according to the perceptual model is proposed. It allows a local measure of the masking of each perceptual stimulus considering the contrast between signal and estimated noise. This measure is obtained by analytic filtering. Processing schemes are presented with applications to the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and subband coded images. One proposed solution considers the characteristics of DCT coding noise for the estimation of the noise. Another solution is based on a "blind" neural estimation of the noise characteristics. Experimental results of the proposed approaches show significant improvements of the visual quality, which validates our perceptual model and filtering.