Efficient Low Bit-Rate Intra-Frame Coding using Common Information for 360-degree Video

With the growth of video technologies, super-resolution videos, including 360-degree immersive video has become a reality due to exciting applications such as augmented/virtual/mixed reality for better interaction and a wide-angle user-view experience of a scene compared to traditional video with narrow-focused viewing angle. The new generation video contents are bandwidth-intensive in nature due to high resolution and demand high bit rate as well as low latency delivery requirements that pose challenges in solving the bottleneck of transmission and storage burdens. There is limited optimisation space in traditional video coding schemes for improving video coding efficiency in intra-frame due to the fixed size of processing block. This paper presents a new approach for improving intra-frame coding especially at low bit rate video transmission for 360-degree video for lossy mode of HEVC. Prior to using traditional HEVC intra-prediction, this approach exploits the global redundancy of entire frame by extracting common important information using multi-level discrete wavelet transformation. This paper demonstrates that the proposed method considering only low frequency information of a frame and encoding this can outperform the HEVC standard at low bit rates. The experimental results indicate that the proposed intra-frame coding strategy achieves an average of 54.07% BD-rate reduction and 2.84 dB BD-PSNR gain for low bit rate scenario compared to the HEVC. It also achieves a significant improvement in encoding time reduction of about 66.84% on an average. Moreover, this finding also demonstrates that the existing HEVC block partitioning can be applied in the transform domain for better exploitation of information concentration as we applied HEVC on wavelet frequency domain.