Efficient prediction error regions determination for region-based video coding through shape adaptive DCT

An efficient strategy to determine the prediction error regions to be coded within a region-based prediction error coding scheme is presented. Prediction error coding is based on the segmentation of the displaced field difference (DFD) and coding the resulting arbitrary shaped DFD regions using shape adaptive DCT. Efficiency in the determination of the DFD regions to be coded is achieved by eliminating from the selection process the direct computation of the cost of region contours and textures coding. With this scheme, perceptual distortion of the decoded images is reduced while quality is locally improved on relevant image areas. Comparative results with the complete H.263 coder are shown