Arbitrarily shaped Object coding based on H.264/AVC

Recent video coding research gives birth to the latest video coding standard H.264/AVC whose compression performance significantly exceeds previous standards with more than 50%. But as compared with the MPEG-4, the capability of coding arbitrarily shaped objects is absent from the latest standard. In this paper, we propose a new arbitrarily shaped object coding codec including encoder and decoder based on the latest H.264/AVC, and adopts improved binary alpha coding with a novel motion estimation to facilitate the binary alpha blocks prediction and in the texture coding, a new arbitrarily shaped integer transform derivative from 4x4 ICT in H.264 to code texture and associated coding techniques. Experimental results prove the coding efficiency and flexibility of our proposal and the potential applications are demonstrated.