Performance analysis, parameter selection and extensions to H.264/AVC FRExt for high resolution video coding

H.264/AVC FRExt (Fidelity Range Extensions) and Motion JPEG 2000 are the current respective inter-frame and intra-frame coding standards for high resolution (HR) (e.g., 4096 × 2160) visual signals. It is commonly believed that an inter-frame method could achieve higher coding efficiency compared with an intra-frame one, due to the exploitation of video temporal redundancy. However, Motion JPEG 2000 has been selected as the digital cinema compression standard, and some existing work has demonstrated that JPEG 2000 is more suitable at HR situations. In this paper, we compare the rate–distortion (R–D) performance of these two different schemes and give more insight from both theoretical and experimental point of view. We derive an entropy-based R–D model to analyze the test results and the impact of residual entropy and quantization for inter-frame coding. Several extensions are introduced into H.264/AVC FRExt for HR video content for better performance. Experimental results show that these extensions lead to significantly higher coding efficiency and make our extended version more suitable for HR video coding

Research highlights
► We compare the R-D performance of H.264/AVC FRExt and Motion JPEG 2000.
► We derive an entropy-based R-D model to analyze the quantized residual entropy.
► Several extensions are introduced into H.264/AVC FRExt for high resolution video.
► These extensions lead to significantly higher coding efficiency for HR content.