Arbitrarily shaped object coding based on H.264/AVC

Recent video coding research gives birth to the latest video coding standard H.264/AVC whose compression performance significantly exceeds previous standards with more than 50%. But as compared with the MPEG-4, the capability of coding arbitrarily shaped objects is absent from the latest standard. In this paper, we propose a new arbitrarily shaped object coding codec including encoder and decoder based on the latest H.264/AVC, and adopts improved binary alpha coding with a novel motion estimation to facilitate the binary alpha blocks prediction and in the texture coding, a new arbitrarily shaped integer transform derivative from 4 × 4 ICT in H.264 to code texture and associated coding techniques. Experimental results prove the coding efficiency and flexibility of our proposal and the potential applications are demonstrated.