A Low-Complexity Screen Compression Scheme for Interactive Screen Sharing

Interactive screen sharing requires extremely low latency end-to-end transmission, which in turn requires highly efficient and low-complexity screen compression. In this paper, we present a block-based low-complexity screen compression scheme, in which multiple block modes are adopted to exploit the intra- and inter-frame redundancies. In particular, we classify the intra-coded blocks to pictorial blocks and textual blocks using a proposed fast block classification algorithm, which exploits the discriminative features between the pictorial and the textual blocks. Then, we design a low-complexity, yet efficient, algorithm to compress the textual blocks. We use base colors and escape colors to represent and quantize the textual pixels, which not only achieves high compression ratios but also preserves a high quality on textual pixels. The two-dimensionally predictive index coding and hierarchical pattern coding technologies are used to exploit local spatial correlations and global pattern correlation, respectively. To further utilize the correlation between the luminance and chrominance channels, we propose a joint-channel index coding method. We compare the coding efficiency and the computational complexity of the proposed scheme against the standard image coding schemes such as JPEG, JPEG2000, and PNG, the compound image compressor HJPC, and the popular video coding standard H.264. We also compare the visual quality of the proposed scheme against H.264 intra coding, JPEG2000, and HJPC. The evaluation results show that the proposed scheme achieves superior or comparable compression efficiency with much lower complexity than other schemes in most of the cases.