Improved H.264/AVC coding using texture analysis and synthesis

We assume that the textures in a video scene can be classified into two categories: textures with unimportant subjective details and the remainder. We utilize this assumption for improved video coding using a texture analyzer and a texture synthesizer. The texture analyzer identifies the texture regions with unimportant subjective details and generates coarse masks as well as side information for the texture synthesizer at the decoder side. The texture synthesizer replaces the identified textures by inserting synthetic textures for the identified regions. The texture analyzer is based on MPEG-7 descriptors. Our approach has been integrated into an H.264/AVC codec. Bit-rate savings up to 19.4% are shown for a semiautomatic texture analyzer given similar subjective quality as the H.264/AVC codec without the presented approach.