Lossless Image and Intra-Frame Compression With Integer-to-Integer DST

Video coding standards are primarily designed for efficient lossy compression, but it is also desirable to support efficient lossless compression within video coding standards using small modifications to the lossy coding architecture. A simple approach is to skip transform and quantization, and simply entropy code the prediction residual. However, this approach is inefficient at compression. A more efficient and popular approach is to skip transform and quantization but also process the residual block in some modes with differential pulse code modulation (DPCM), along the horizontal or vertical direction, prior to entropy coding. This paper explores an alternative approach based on processing the residual block with integer-to-integer (i2i) transforms. I2i transforms can map integer pixels to integer transform coefficients without increasing the dynamic range and can be used for lossless compression. We focus on lossless intra coding and develop novel i2i approximations of the odd type-3 discrete sine transform (ODST-3). Experimental results with the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) reference software show that when the developed i2i approximations of the ODST-3 are used along the DPCM method of HEVC, an average 2.7% improvement of lossless intra frame compression efficiency is achieved over HEVC version 2, which uses only the DPCM method, without a significant increase in computational complexity.