JPEG2000 Rate Control for Digital Cinema

Recent industry developments have made it clear that although digital cinema signals are image sequences, they will almost certainly be compressed using an intra-frame image compression method such as JPEG2000 that operates on one frame at a time. This is in contrast to traditional inter-frame video standards such as MPEG that operate on multiple frames at once. Furthermore, recent research has shown that the coding efficiency advantages of inter-frame coding are significantly reduced for 4K digitized film content at the data rates and quality levels associated with digital cinema. This raises a number of important issues related to rate control methods, which have the goal of maximizing quality while also ensuring that the overall post-compression bit rate maintains average and peak values within the limits of the delivery and decoding systems. While rate control in general has received significant attention in the academic and commercial communities, with a few notable exceptions there has been almost no formal research aimed at addressing the problem when a still image coding method such as JPEG2000 is applied to successive frames in an image sequence. — We introduce a new framework for rate control that enables a JPEG2000 encoder to achieve a user-specified quality, and therefore makes it possible to produce constant quality from frame-to-frame. The new method makes direct use of the same JPEG2000 coding pass data as the traditional approaches, and thus can easily be adopted at the back end of JPEG2000 encoding engines. We compare the proposed method with two other common rate-control techniques for JPEG2000.

Published

2006-01

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00373

ISBN

978-1-61482-938-6