Local texture synthesis: A static texture coding algorithm fully compatible with HEVC

Abstract

Textures are one of the main characteristics of the visual scene. Perceptually, their details are less important than their semantic meaning. This property has been exploited in many texture coding (content based video coding) approaches by removing parts of the textures in the encoder and synthesizing them at the decoder side. Such an approach would necessarily need modification of the coding process and violating the standard. This paper introduces a novel algorithm for texture coding called Local Texture Synthesis (LTS), in which texture synthesis is employed in a full compatibility with HEVC standard. This implies that a basic HEVC decoder can be used to reconstruct the signal. LTS defines the necessary conditions to synthesize a patch and produces different synthesis of it. It tries then coding each of them, and finally chooses the one that minimizes the coding cost. A prototype of this algorithm, based on Markov Random Fields, is given in this paper. This prototype provides up to 10% bitrate saving (using the same quantization parameter) while maintaining an equivalent visual quality.