Improvement of video coding efficiency based on sparse contractive mapping approach

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for improving video coding efficiency based on a sparse contractive mapping approach. The proposed method introduces a new sparse contractive mapping approach to replace the traditional intra prediction in the video coding standards such as H.264/AVC. Specifically, the intra- and its following inter-frame are respectively approximated by the sparse representation, satisfying contractive mapping. Then these two frames can be reconstructed from an arbitrary initial image by utilizing a few representation coefficients. With this advantage, the proposed method reduces the total amount of bits by removing MBs in the target I frame, whose approximation performance is higher than the others in the encoder. Furthermore, by transmitting the representation coefficients of the removed MBs, these MBs can be accurately reconstructed in the decoder. Since the reconstruction performance is better than that of the conventional approach, the proposed method can remove more MBs from the target video sequences, and reduction of total amount of bits can be feasible. Therefore, the proposed method realizes the improvement of the video coding efficiency. Some experimental results are shown to verify the superior performance of the proposed method to that of H.264/AVC. The results also demonstrate that the bit-saving performance of the proposed method is comparable to that of H.265/HEVC.