Luminance Adaptive Coding of Chrominance Signals

We describe two techniques for digital coding of the chrominance components of a color television signal. Both techniques make use of an observation that in color pictures most of the locations of large spatial changes in the chrominance are coincident with large spatial changes in the luminance. This allows us to predict the chrominance samples more efficiently using the previously transmitted chrominance and luminance samples, and the present luminance sample. In general, we determine which of the previous luminance samples best represents the present luminance sample and use the corresponding previous chrominance sample to represent the present chrominance sample. We present results of computer simulations of two such coding schemes. The first scheme, in which the chrominance components are coded by a DPCM coder, uses adaptive prediction of the chrominance components based on the luminance. In the second scheme, the chrominance signal is adaptively extrapolated from its past using the luminance signal for adaptation. Only those chrominance samples where the extrapolation error is more than a threshold are transmitted to the receiver. The addresses of such samples are derived from the luminance signal and therefore need not be transmitted. Our computer simulations on videotelephone type of pictures, indicate that, for the predictive coding, the entropy of the coded chrominance signals can he reduced by about 15 to 20 percent by adaptation. This results in a bit rate of 0.55 bits/ luminance pel, for transmission of chrominance information. Using adaptive extrapolation, only about 20 percent of the chrominance samples need to be transmitted which results in a bit rate of approximately 0.58 bits/luminance pel.