Standard-compliant HEVC screen content coding for raw light field image coding

Abstract

Intra block copy (IBC) in screen content coding (SCC) increases the coding efficiency of screen content (SC) by finding the repeating patterns within the same frame. A raw light field (LF) image contains plentiful repeating patterns since each microlens is capturing the same scene. SCC can be an efficient encoder for LF image compression. Therefore, first, we propose a new LF coding (LFC) model using SCC to encode LF images based on LF image characteristics. Second, a fast IBC search, which is specially designed for light field images, is proposed to reduce the encoder complexity. Experimental results show that our LFC model further improves the coding efficiency of SCC on LF images by 4.87% on average and up to 10.81% bitrate reduction. With our proposed LFC model, the encoded bitstreams are complaint to the SCC standard with even faster decoding time which is user friendly.