Chapter 8 - Modern transform design for practical audio/image/video coding applications

Abstract

This chapter offers an overall review of recent advances in the design of modern transforms for audio, image and video coding applications. Transforms have been an integral part of signal coding applications from the beginning, but emphasis had been on true floating-point decomposition schemes for most of that history. With the proliferation of low-power handheld multimedia devices, a new vision of integer-only transforms that provide high performance yet very low complexity has quickly gained ascendency. We emphasize key design approaches to creating integer transforms, and focus on a systematic, universal method based on decomposition into lifting steps, and use of (dyadic) rational coefficients. This method provides a wealth of solutions, many of which are already in use in leading media codecs today, such as JPEG2000, H.264, HD-Photo/JPEG-XR, and scalable audio.