A novel fractal monocular and stereo video codec with object-based functionality

Abstract

Based on the classical fractal video compression method, an improved monocular fractal compression method is proposed which includes using more effective macroblock partition scheme instead of classical quadtree partition scheme; using improved fast motion estimation to increase the calculation speed; using homo-I-frame like in H.264, etc. The monocular codec uses the motion compensated prediction (MCP) structure. And stereo fractal video coding is proposed which matches the macroblock with two reference frames in left and right views, and it results in increasing compression ratio and reducing bit rate/bandwidth when transmitting compressed video data. The stereo codec combines MCP and disparity compensated prediction. And a new method of object-based fractal video coding is proposed in which each object can be encoded and decoded independently with higher compression ratio and speed and less bit rate/bandwidth when transmitting compressed stereo video data greatly. Experimental results indicate that the proposed monocular method can raise compression ratio 3.6 to 7.5 times, speed up compression time 5.3 to 22.3 times, and improve the image quality 3.81 to 9.24 dB in comparison with circular prediction mapping and non-contractive interframe mapping. The PSNR of the proposed stereo video coding is about 0.17 dB higher than that of the proposed monocular video coding, and 0.69 dB higher than that of JMVC 4.0 on average. Comparing with the bit rate resulted by the proposed monocular video coding and JMVC 4.0, the proposed stereo video coding achieves, on average, 2.53 and 21.14 Kbps bit rate saving, respectively. The proposed object-based fractal monocular and stereo video coding methods are simple and effective, and they make the applications of fractal monocular and stereo video coding more flexible and practicable. © 2012 Zhu et al.; licensee Springer.