Dynamic texture synthesis for H.264/AVC inter coding

Abstract

Dynamic textures are sequences of frames exhibiting certain stationarity properties over time; examples are sea-waves, whirlwind or moving crowds. We present an algorithm for dynamic texture extrapolation using only few training frames. A dynamic texture synthesizer using this algorithm has been integrated into a state-of-the-art H.264/AVC coding system, such that synthesized frames can be used by the encoder and decoder for inter prediction. For sequences not containing dynamic textures the same performance as with the conventional encoding system was achieved. In the case of sequences containing dynamic textures, intra coded macroblocks can be avoided by using the synthesized frame. Bitrate savings of up to 10% have been observed experimentally.