Improved Line-based Image Coding by Exploiting Long-Distance Correlations

Line-based coding has shown its potential in improving the coding efficiency of intra-frame/image coding due to its flexibility in prediction. In our previous work we proposed an efficient line-based image coding method (LIC) by adaptive line-by-line prediction (ALP) and adaptive residue coding. In this paper we further improve this line-based coding scheme by exploiting long-distance correlations in prediction. Line-by-line template matching (LTM) is introduced to perform the long-distance prediction. Experiments in the KTA software show that the LTM scheme can effectively improve the performance of LIC at low bitrates and also brings some improvement at high bitrates. Up to 1db gain is achieved compared to previous LIC and 1.5db compared to KTA on images with regular patterns or strong edges. Up to 20% rate reduction over KTA is also achieved on some standard video sequences with different resolutions.