Inter Frame Video Compression With Large Dictionaries of Tilings: Algorithms for Tiling Selection and Entropy Coding

We propose the use of large tree-structured dictionaries of tilings for video compression. Our first contribution is the construction of a rate-distortion cost function that admits fast search algorithms to select the optimal tiling for the motion compensation stage of a video coder. The computation of the cost is enabled through novel algorithms to approximate the bit rate and the distortion. Our second contribution is an efficient arithmetic coding algorithm to encode the selected tree-structured tiling. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by showing that a H.264/AVC-like video coder utilizing one of the proposed tiling selection methods results in up to 16% savings in bit rate for several standard video sequences as compared to H.264/AVC. This is accomplished with only a modest increase in the computation time at the encoder.