In-loop atom modulus quantization for matching pursuit and its application to video coding

Abstract

This paper provides a precise analytical study of the selection and modulus quantization of matching pursuit (MP) coefficients. We demonstrate that an optimal rate-distortion trade-off is achieved by selecting the atoms up to a quality-dependent threshold, and by defining the modulus quantizer in terms of that threshold. In doing so, we take into account quantization error re-injection resulting from inserting the modulus quantizer inside the MP atom computation loop. In-loop quantization not only improves coding performance, but also affects the optimal quantizer design for both uniform and nonuniform quantization. We measure the impact of our work in the context of video coding. For both uniform and nonuniform quantization, the precise understanding of the relation between atom selection and quantization results in significant improvements in terms of coding efficiency. At high bitrates, the proposed nonuniform quantization scheme results in 0.5 to 2 dB improvement over the previous method.