High-definition video coding with super-macroblocks

A high definition video coding technique using super-macroblocks is investigated in this work. Our research is motivated by the observation that the macroblock-based partition in H.264/AVC may not be efficient for high definition video since the maximum macroblock size of 16 x 16 is relatively small against the whole image size. In the proposed super-macboblock based video coding scheme, the original block size M x N in H.264 is scaled to 2M x 2N. Along with the super-macroblock prediction framework, a low-complexity 16 x 16 discrete cosine transform (DCT) is proposed. As compared with the I D 8 x 8 DCT, only 16 additions are added for a I D 16 points 16 x 16 DCT. Furthermore, an adaptive scheme is proposed for the selection the best coding mode and best transform size. It is shown by experimental results that the super-macroblock coding scheme can achieve a higher coding gain.