Design of video encoder using Multi-dimensional DCT

In H.264/AVC, 44 block transform is used for intra and inter prediction instead of 88 block transform. Using small block size coding, H.264/AVC obtains high temporal prediction efficiency, however, it has limitation in utilizing spatial redundancy. Motivated on these points, we propose a multi-dimensional transform which achieves both the accuracy of temporal prediction as well as effective use of spatial redundancy. From preliminary experiments, the proposed multi-dimensional transform achieves higher energy compaction than 2-D DCT used in H.264. We designed an integer-based transform and quantization coder for multi-dimensional coder. Moreover, several additional methods for multi-dimensional coder are proposed, which are cube forming, scan order, mode decision and updating parameters. The Context-based Adaptive Variable-Length Coding (CAVLC) used in H.264 was employed for the entropy coder. Simulation results show that the performance of the multi-dimensional codec appears similar to that of H.264 in lower bit rates although the rate-distortion curves of the multi-dimensional DCT measured by entropy and the number of non-zero coefficients show remarkably higher performance than those of H.264/AVC. This implies that more efficient entropy coder optimized to the statistics of multi-dimensional DCT coefficients and rate-distortion operation are needed to take full advantage of the multi-dimensional DCT. There remains many issues and future works about multi-dimensional coder to improve coding efficiency over H.264/AVC.