Low-complexity subband encoding for HDTV images

The transmission of high-definition television (HDTV) signals on available digital networks and satellites requires the adoption of sophisticated compression techniques to limit the bit rate requirements and to provide high-quality and reliable service to customers. For processing and transmission of image signals, a low-complexity codec without visible degradation is desired. A low-complexity intraframe subband image coding algorithm is developed. The low band is DPCM encoded and the high bands are PCM encoded. An efficient entropy coder is designed which reduces the overall bit rate significantly. It is shown that high-quality HDTV images can be obtained at as low a bit rate as 45 Mb/s or less with a very low-complexity encoder. For dividing the image into subbands, a new class of quadrature mirror filters (QMFs) called generalized quadrature mirror filters (GQMFs) is used for filtering. Performance is also evaluated by using short kernel filters (SKFs), which are easy to implement and require very few computations