Adaptive Huffman coding of 2-D DCT coefficients for image sequence compression

摘要

This paper presents a new approach to adaptive Huffman coding of 2-D DCT coefficients for image sequence compression. Based on the popular motion-compensated interframe coding, the proposed method employs self-switching multiple Huffman codebooks for entropy coding of quantized transform coefficients. Unlike the existing multiple codebook approaches where the type of block (intra/inter or luminance/chrominance) selects a codebook, the proposed method jointly utilizes the type of block, the quantizer step size, and the zigzag scan position for the purpose of codebook selection. In addition, as another utilization of the quantizer step size and the scan position, the proposed method uses a variable-length “Escape” sequence for encoding rare symbols. Experimental results show that the proposed method with two codebooks provides 0.1–0.4 dB improvement over the single-codebook scheme and this margin turns out to be substantially larger than that the MPEG-2, two-codebook approach has over the single-codebook approach.