Prediction-based adaptive transform coefficients scanning for inter-frame video coding

In H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, the quantized coefficients are typically scanned in a fixed zig-zag pattern. This fixed scanning order may not always be optimal for entropy coding. To achieve better entropy coding gain in inter-frame coding, we propose a predictive scan ordering scheme and show that additional inter-frame coding redundancy can be removed by our proposed method. The scanning orders are dynamically updated based on the probabilistic distribution of quantized coefficients in the previous frames. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves coding efficiency by an average of 3.62% and up to 5.63% with negligible additional computational cost.