A scene adaptive hybrid video coding scheme based on the LOT

Conventional standard video coding schemes based on independent coding of nonoverlapping image blocks produce undesirable effects (blocking effect and color bleeding, etc.) at low bit rate. A hybrid coding scheme evolving from the standard MPEG codec that combines lapped orthogonal transform (LOT) and overlapped block motion compensation and quantization approaches based on human visual system sensitivity is proposed to remove the artifacts. The LOT is applied to compress the resulting prediction errors of the overlapped motion compensation. The LOT coefficients are quantized by a dynamic intra/inter scene adaptive quantizer that is designed according to the human visual system and scene analysis to optimize the decoded image quality. This technique involves automatically deriving the most favorable quantizer matrix from the motion and scene analysis of image sequences and scaling the resulting matrix further by considering the buffer status. If a scene change is detected from the motion information, the proposed adaptive quantization can also help solve the difficulty of the buffer controller and maintain the picture quality as constant as possible. Performance of the proposed hybrid coding scheme with scene adaptive quantizer is demonstrated by computer simulations using standard test sequences and compared to that of the conventional MPEG-2 coding schemes. Subjective and objective tests show that image quality is improved considerably and the required bit rate is much less than that of the conventional method. Particularly, the image quality can be kept almost consistent, and the undesirable artifacts are reduced considerably.