Representing Visual Objects in HEVC Coding Loop

Different from the previous video coding standards that employ fixed-size coding blocks (and macroblocks), the latest high efficiency video coding (HEVC) introduces a quadtree structure to represent variable-size coding blocks in the coding loop. The main objective of this study is to investigate a novel way to reuse these variable-size blocks to represent the foreground objects in the picture. Towards this end, this paper proposes three methods, i.e., flagging the blocks lying in the object regions flagging compression blocks (FCB), adding an object tree in each Coding Tree Unit to describe the objects' shape in it additional object tree (AOT) and confining the block splitting procedure to fit the object shape confining by shape (CBS). Among them, FCB and CBS add a flag bit in the syntax description of the block to indicate whether it lies in the objects region, while AOT adds a separate quadtree to represent the objects. For all these methods, the additional bits are then fed into the HEVC entropy coding module to compress. As such, the representation of visual objects in the pictures can be implemented in the HEVC coding loop by reusing the variable-size blocks and entropy coding, without additional coding tools. The experiments on six manually-segmented HEVC testing sequences (three in 1080P and three in 720P) demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal. To represent the objects in the 1080P testing sequences, the BD rate increases of FCB, AOT, and CBS over the HEVC anchor are 1.57%, 3.27%, and 5.93% respectively; while for the 720P conference videos, those are 4.57%, 17.23%, and 26.93% (note that the average bitrate of the anchor is only 1009 kb/s).