A Low Cost Video Coding Scheme Using Texture Synthesis

In this paper, a new low cost texture-synthesis based video coding scheme is presented for H.264/AVC, which is well-suited for a specific class of stochastic texture like water, and cloud, etc. We give a solution to two key problems that bother the application of texture synthesis in video coding for a long time. One is the synthesis cost of the decoder, and the other is the visible artifact of the output synthetic texture. In our proposal, to preserve the texture's high-order information and against the global motion, sequential texture region is copied to the synthesis region in a considerable scale in contrast with the existing synthesis method used in video coding. In this way, the tremendous computational cost is transferred to the encoder, which can greatly simplify the decoder design. This scheme has been integrated into H.264/AVC, and the real-time synthesis can be achieved at similar visual quality levels compared with H.264/AVC, with large amount of bit-rate saved.