H.264-based hierarchical two-layer lossless video coding method

An efficient lossless coding technique is very important for storage and transmission applications of error sensitive information such as medical, seismic and digital artistic data. In this study, the authors proposed an H.264-based advance video coding (H.264/AVC)-based hierarchical lossless coding method, where the input video will be firstly encoded by H.264/AVC coder with a quantisation parameter (QP) selector in the base layer and the coded error is encoded by a QP-adaptive Rice coder in the enhancement layer. To reduce encoding time, the QP selector can be simplified to select the nearly optimal QP. Simulation results show that the proposed hierarchical lossless coding architecture achieves better compression ratio than the traditional H.264/AVC-based lossless coding systems. Since the proposed system could provide both lossy and lossless coding services at the same time, the proposed lossless video coding system has advantages of efficiency and flexibility for practical applications. Experimental results show that the proposed coding system can provide less coding bits and reduce coding complexity compare with H.264-differential pulse code modulation.