Phase Congruency based edge saliency detection and rate control for perceptual image and video coding

Phase Congruency (PC) features are firstly introduced into image and video coding field in this paper. As an effective tool to measure the edge information for image textures, PC change can be used to evaluate the compression loss, i.e. the coding distortions in image and video coding. Firstly, the compression influences on PC maps are given and analyzed. Secondly, the relationship between the consumed bits and the PC distortion are modeled. Lastly, the Mean-Squared-Error (MSE) based and PC distortion based optimized Coding Tree Unit (CTU) level bit allocation solutions are combined as a two step bit allocation and rate control method for intra frames for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the state-of-the-art JCTVC-K0103 and JCTVC-M0257 methods, for small size videos, the proposed method can achieve significant R-D performance gains, and also works well on PC map preservation, quality smoothness and bit rate accuracy.