Extending HEVC using texture synthesis

Bastian Wandt, Thorsten Laude, Yiqun Liu, Bodo Rosenhahn, Jörn Ostermann

Abstract: The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard provides superior coding efficiency compared to its predecessors. Nevertheless, the encoding of complex and thus hardly to predict textures either requires high bit rates or results in low quality of the reconstructed signal. To compensate for this limitation of HEVC, we propose a sophisticated texture synthesis framework which solves multiple lacks of previous texture synthesis approaches. By easing the bit rate cost for synthesizable regions and reallocating the freed bit rate resources to non-synthesizable regions, for high-value soccer content we are able to achieve average BD-rate gains of 21.9% for all-intra, 17.6% for low delay, and 16.3% for random access, respectively, while maintaining the same objective quality for the latter. Subjective tests for the synthesizable regions confirm the objectively measured convincing results. The general applicability of our method is confirmed for other types of content.