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Abstract

Image quality is improved in high definition television using multi-scale representation of motion compensated residuals. The bandwidths of the subband filters vary with the frequency band and the total number of coefficients in the multi-scale-represented frames is equal to the number of values in the residual. Image initialization in the receivers is achieved using original image leakage, but the leakage factor is varied for different frequency subbands. To free up channel capacity at scene changes, a global (i.e., substantially frame-wide) decision is made as to whether to motion compensate a particular frame. To avoid the unattractive ghost of the previous scene persisting for a short time in a new scene, the motion estimator makes a decision on a block-by-block basis whether to use the original image or the residual. Chrominance resolution is improved by encoding all of the subbands of the chroma residuals, instead of just the low subbands. The chroma residuals are encoded at relatively coarser quantization than the luma residual, but when the energy of the luma residual is low (as, e.g. may occur when there is little motion), chroma quantization is improved, by making an overall (both chroma and luma) reduction in quantization step size. Runlength-amplitude representation and statistical coding are used. Runlength-amplitude representation is applied to entire subbands, and, preferably, different codebooks are used in statistically coding different subbands, to take advantage of the different statistics in the different subbands. The quantization coarseness is adaptively varied based on a computation of the number of bits necessary to statistically code a particular frame, thus guaranteeing for each frame exactly (or approximately, if a small buffer is provided in the decoder) the number of bits available in the channel.

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