Transform Coding Techniques in HEVC

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the most recent jointly developed video coding standard of ITU-T Visual Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). Although its basic architecture is built along the conventional hybrid block-based approach of combining prediction with transform coding, HEVC includes a number of coding tools with greatly enhanced coding-efficiency capabilities relative to those of prior video coding standards. Among these tools are new transform coding techniques that include the support for dyadically increasing transform block sizes ranging from 4 × 4 to 32 × 32, the partitioning of residual blocks into variable block-size transforms by using a quadtree-based partitioning dubbed as residual quadtree (RQT) as well as some properly designed entropy coding techniques for quantized transform coefficients of variable transform block sizes. In this paper, we describe these HEVC techniques for transform coding with a particular focus on the RQT structure and the entropy coding stage and demonstrate their benefit in terms of improved coding efficiency by experimental results.