Improved compression of motion-compensated residuals

We introduce a simple and effective technique for coding motion-compensated residuals based on the discrete cosine transform and embedded bit-plane coding. The encoding of each bit-plane is driven by a significance block map that is created to take advantage of the clustering of large (or small) variance coefficients inherent in motion-compensated residuals. A simple classification scheme based on the significance block map is then applied to the identified significant coefficients to improve coding efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms MPEG-II in coding of interframes by 0.3 - 2.5 dB. In most cases it also outperforms SPIHT-AC and has lower complexity. Blocking artifacts are also less visible in some sequences coded at low bitrates.