HEVC-based video coding with lossless region of interest for telemedicine applications

This paper presents a novel video coding system based on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) for telemedicine applications. The proposed system follows a two-layer design approach which employs the next-generation HEVC video compression standard for the base layer. The enhancement layer includes additional information for refining the quality of a user-defined region of interest (ROI) in each video frame. When the base layer and the enhancement layer are combined at the decoder side, the content in the ROI is losslessly reconstructed whereas the remaining part of the video frame is decoded at base layer quality. Performance evaluations are carried out using YCbCr 4:4:4 video sequences with mixed synthetic and medical contents. The proposed system demonstrates superior rate-distortion performance compared to HEVC intra encoding and achieves up to 3.15% bit-rate reduction compared to the proposed system without ROI support.