A staircase transform coding scheme for screen content video coding
Cheng Chen, Jingning Han, Yaowu Xu, James Bankoski · 2016
Demand for screen content videos that contain computer generated text and graphics is growing. They are very different from natural videos, because they include much sharper edge transitions and very repetitive patterns. On this type of material, the efficacy of the conventional discrete cosine transform (DCT) is questionable because it relies on the assumption that a Gauss-Markov model leads to a base-band signal. However, the assumption may not hold true for screen content material. This work exploits a class of staircase transforms. Unlike the DCT whose bases are samplings of sinusoidal functions, the staircase transforms have their bases sampled from staircase functions, which better approximate the sharp transitions often encountered in the context of screen content. The staircase transform is integrated into a hybrid transform coding scheme, in conjunction with DCT. It is experimentally shown that the proposed approach provides an average of 2.9% compression performance gains in terms of BD-rate reduction. A perceptual comparison further demonstrates that the use of staircase transform achieves substantial reduction in ringing artifact due to the Gibbs phenomenon.