Polyphase components of an image as video frames: A way to code still images using H.264

This paper shows that the principles of video coding that are related to removing temporal redundancy by means of motion estimation and compensation can be successfully used to compress still images. If all polyphase components of an image are identified with correlated video frames, only one of them needs to be intra-coded, as the rest can be encoded using mainly bidirectional prediction. Using the H.264 reference software, it has been experimentally verified that the approach offers compression comparable to intra-coding the whole image as a single video frame, the common way of applying the H.264 standard to still pictures. As the H.264 encoder is not optimized for processing polyphase components, the results suggest that, based on the presented idea, it is possible to develop a new image codec that could compete with the state-of-art algorithms.