This paper describes the background, design and application of a new SEI message – the Multiplane Image Information SEI message, which has recently been adopted into the Technology under Consideration (TuC) document of the JVET committee for potential inclusion in the VSEI standard (ITU-T H.274 and ISO/IEC 23002-7). The paper also provides preliminary compression experiment results and analysis on the implications of the coding efficiency and functionality of the different packing options supported in the SEI message.

Summary form only given. High-resolution color video (in 4:4:4 format) is becoming increasingly important for screen content and graphics. We have developed a frame packing arrangement (FPA) scheme that enables transmission of 4:4:4 luma-chroma (YUV or YCoCg) content through conventional subsampled chroma (4:2:0) codecs as an approach for low-cost support of 4:4:4 content. We focus on the "band separation" method initially discussed in [1] and evaluate new scenarios with the 4:4:4 and 4:2:0 versions at similar compression levels. We use the HEVC HM12.0 reference software for evaluating the FPA scheme. We vary the luma QP for the main 4:2:0 representation from 10 to 34, keeping the QP for the main frame's chroma and auxiliary frame's luma and chroma (containing three-fourths of the 4:4:4 chroma data) at the same value as the luma QP. We then compare the final 4:4:4 chroma rate-distortion performance of band separation, direct frame packing, and native HM 4:4:4 encoding. We also show preliminary results for lifting-based band separation (with clipping), which eliminates the inherent rounding errors of other band separation filters and provides better rate-distortion performance. Fig. 1 provides an example for a typical case of the new results showing that both the "band separation" and "lifting-based band separation" approaches have much better performance than previously reported, and are significantly better than the earlier-developed "direct" frame packing approach. Although the rate-distortion performance is inferior to that of native HM 4:4:4 coding, the FPA scheme enables the use of existing 4:2:0 decoding hardware, thus allowing for considerable battery power savings in mobile devices. A more complete discussion and evaluation is available in [2].

We present a method to convey high-resolution color (4:4:4) video content through a video coding system designed for chroma-sub sampled (4:2:0) operation. The method operates by packing the samples of a 4:4:4 frame into two frames that are then encoded as if they were ordinary 4:2:0 content. After being received and decoded, the packing process is reversed to recover a 4:4:4 video frame. As 4:2:0 is the most widely supported digital color format, the described scheme provides an effective way of transporting 4:4:4 content through existing mass-market encoders and decoders, for applications such as coding of screen content. The described packing arrangement is designed such that the spatial correspondence and motion vector displacement relationships between the nominally-luma and nominally-chroma components are preserved. The use of this scheme can be indicated by a metadata tag such as the frame packing arrangement supplemental enhancement information (SEI) message defined in the HEVC and AVC (Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10) video coding standards. In this context the scheme would operate in a similar manner as is commonly used for packing the two views of stereoscopic 3D video for compatible encoding. The technique can also be extended to transport 4:2:2 video through 4:2:0 systems or 4:4:4 video through 4:2:2 systems.

We present a low-complexity integer-reversible spectral-spatial transform that allows for efficient loss less and lossy compression of color-filter-array images (also referred to as camera-raw images). The main advantage of this new transform is that it maps the pixel array values into a format that can be directly compressed in a loss less, lossy, or progressive-to-loss less manner by an existing typical image coder such as JPEG 2000 or JPEG XR. Thus, no special codec design is needed for compressing the camera-raw data. Another advantage is that the new transform allows for mild compression of camera-raw data in a near-loss less format, allowing for very high quality offline post-processing, but with camera-raw files that can be half the size of those of existing camera-raw formats.

The blocking artifacts that arise in the use of traditional vector quantization (VQ) schemes can, in general, be virtually eliminated via an efficient lapped VQ strategy. With lapped VQ, blocks are obtained from the source in an overlapped manner, and reconstructed via superposition of overlapped codevectors. The new scheme, which we term lapped orthogonal vector quantization (LOVQ), requires no increase in bit rate and, in contrast to other proposed approaches, no significant increase in computational complexity or memory requirements. Attractively, the use of LOVQ also leads to a modest increase in coding gain over traditional VQ schemes of comparable complexity.