Down-sampling based embedded compression in video systems

With rapid increase of image resolution in modern video processing and display systems, the bandwidth and power consumption of external memory are becoming serious bottlenecks. This problem can be alleviated by high-fidelity embedded compression (EC) techniques for video frame buffers. Classic lossless or near-lossless coding methods like CALIC are ill suited for embedded systems due to their high complexity. In this work, a new, simple infra-frame EC technique based on downsampling and side-information aided upsampling is developed. Through a study of a family of downsampling schemes, an optimal one is found and analyzed for EC. This downsampling scheme gives birth to the new EC technique. The main idea is to first split an image into blocks, and then adaptively choose different down sampling patterns and upsampling methods to code/decode these blocks. For a memory bandwidth reduction of 60%, the proposed EC system can achieve PSNR above 40dB, while allowing very simple, low-cost real-time hardware realization. A noteworthy novelty of this work is compression without entropy coding. The resulting code stream is of fixed-rate, supporting random access to pixel blocks.