Fractal block coding of digital video

A video coding method is proposed which is based upon fractal block coding. The method utilizes a novel three-dimensional partitioning of input frames for which a number of efficient block-matching search methods can be used, and permits spatio-temporal splitting of the input blocks to improve overall-encoding quality. After describing the basic fractal block coding algorithm, the details of the proposed three-dimensional algorithm are presented along with encoding and decoding results from two standard video test sequences, representative of videoconferencing data. These results indicate that average compression rates ranging from 40 to 77 can be obtained with subjective reconstruction quality of video-conferencing quality. The results also indicate that, in order to meet the compression rates required for very low bit rate coding, it is necessary to employ additional techniques such as entropy encoding of the fractal transformation coefficients. 18 October 1994 11:04 Page 2 of 33 Version 1.1