Advances in Region-based Texture Modelling for Video Compression

This paper presents a parametric video compression framework which exploits both texture warping and dynamic texture synthesis. A perspective motion model is employed to warp static textures and a dynamic texture model is used to synthesise time-varying textures. An artefact-based video quality metric (AVM) is proposed which prevents spatial and temporal artefacts and assesses the reconstructed video quality. This is validated using both the VQEG database and subjective assessment, and shows competitive performance on both non-synthetic and synthetic video content. Moreover, a local Rate-Quality Optimisation (RQO) strategy is developed based on AVM in order to make a decision between waveform coding and texture warping/synthesis. The proposed method has been integrated into an H.264 video coding framework with results offering significant bitrate savings for similar visual quality (based on both AVM and subjective scores).