Dynamic texture synthesis using linear phase shift interpolation

Abstract

Dynamic texture motions like flowing water, motion of leaves etc. have a complex random character. A sequence containing such a content is challenging to encode even when using state of the art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) especially, if the available bandwidth is limited. It is observed that often when predicting dynamic textures, codec switches to intra prediction. At lower rates, dynamic texture content shows visually annoying blurring and blocking artifacts. For dynamic textures, both spatial and temporal details are perceptually of less importance. This property of the Human Visual System (HVS) can be exploited when coding dynamic texture content, as suggested in this paper. At the encoder, preprocessing is done by skipping even numbered B pictures. At the decoder side, skipped pictures are synthesized using linear phase shift interpolation of the complex wavelet coefficients, from the adjacent already decoded pictures. Subjective evaluation of proposed approach is done by using a pair wise comparison test between the proposed results and the conventional HEVC decoded bitstream at similar bitrates. The evaluation results show that viewers prefer the proposed result over conventional HEVC.