Integer fast lapped transforms based on direct-lifting of DCTs for lossy-to-lossless image coding

The discrete cosine transforms (DCTs) have found wide applications in image/video compression (image coding). DCT-based lapped transforms (LTs), called fast LTs (FLTs), overcome blocking artifacts generated at low bit rate image coding by DCT while keeping fast implementation. This paper presents a realization of more effective integer FLT (IntFLT) for lossy-to-lossless image coding, which is unified lossless and lossy image coding, than the conventional IntFLTs. It is composed of few operations and direct application of DCTs to lifting blocks, called direct-lifting of DCTs. Since the direct-lifting can reuse any existing software/hardware for DCTs, the proposed IntFLTs have a great potential for fast implementation which is dependent on the architecture design and DCT algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed IntFLTs do not need any side information unlike integer DCT (IntDCT) based on direct-lifting as our previous work. Moreover, they can be easily extended to larger size which is recently required as in DCT for the standard H.26x series. As a result, the proposed method shows better lossy-to-lossless image coding than the conventional IntFLTs.