A General Method for Detecting All-Zero Blocks Prior to DCT and Quantization

This paper presents an innovative algorithm for detecting all-zero discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficient blocks prior to DCT and quantization for all block-based video coding standards. A mathematic model is established based on analyzing DCT coefficient distribution and applying Paseval energy conservation theorem. The algorithm is applied to H.264 video coding and experimental results show up to 32% higher detection ratio without degrading video quality, compared with results of the existing methods. Furthermore, up to 47% higher detection ratio is achieved by changing the threshold based on DCT coefficient distribution. For motion estimation, much less search points needed by using the proposed method as early termination criterion than that by using the existing methods