On Separate Color-Plane Prediction for Direct 4:4:4 Video Coding

In this paper, we propose a video coding scheme supporting direct 4:4:4 source format, which is designed as a straight-forward extension of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 high profile coding. In the proposed scheme, each color component is encoded with independent spatio-temporal prediction using coding tools supported by MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 high profile, which is now regarded as the most powerful video compression standard in the world. We discuss the performance of the proposed method in comparison with several candidate schemes, and will show that the proposed scheme achieves coding performance improvement in terms of signal representation fidelity (PSNR) around higher bitrate range that is valuable for high quality applications. The presented scheme has been proposed to the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 standardization body as a candidate technique for the new 4:4:4 video coding standard.