Object Boundary Block Coding Using Block Merging Method

블록 병합 기법을 이용한 객체 경계 부분 부호화

Padding is a technique that enables applying conventional discrete cosine transform to encode boundary blocks of arbitrarily shaped objects by assigning imaginary values to the pixels that are not included in the object. Padding prevents the increase of high frequency DCT coefficients. However, in some boundary blocks, too many padded pixels are coded due to a small portion of object pixels. To reduce the number of padded pixels and to improve coding efficiency, we propose a block merging method for texture coding. The proposed mothed searches the shape information of boundary blocks and excludes the 4$\times$4 pixels of 8$\times$8 blocks if all the 4$\times$4 pixels are in the background region, and merges the remained 4$\times$4 pixels into new 8$\times$8 blocks. Experimental results show that our proposed method yields a rate-distortion gain about 0.5~1.6㏈ compared to conventional padding method, LPE