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

Abstract 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.