High-end monitors and TVs based on LCD technology continue to increase their native display resolution to 4k2k and beyond. Subsequently, uncompressed pixel data transmission becomes costly when transmitting over cable or wireless communication channels. For motion video content, spatial preprocessing from YCbCr 444 to YCbCr 420 is widely accepted. However, due to spatial low pass filtering in horizontal and vertical direction, quality and readability of small text and graphics content is heavily compromised when color contrast is high in chrominance channels. On the other hand, straight forward YCbCr 444 compression based on mathematical error coding schemes quite often lacks optimal adaptation to visually significant image content. Therefore, we present the idea of detecting synthetic small text fonts and fine graphics and applying contour phase predictive coding for improved text and graphics rendering at the decoder side. Using a predictive parametric (text) contour model and transmitting correlated phase information in vector format across all three color channels combined with foreground/background color vectors of a local color map promises to overcome weaknesses in compression schemes that process luminance and chrominance channels separately. The residual error of the predictive model is being minimized more easily since the decoder is an integral part of the encoder. A comparative analysis based on some competitive solutions highlights the effectiveness of our approach, discusses current limitations with regard to high quality color rendering, and identifies remaining visual artifacts.

Date Published: 4 February 2013
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 8652, Color Imaging XVIII: Displaying, Processing, Hardcopy, and Applications, 86520X (4 February 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2006775

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8652:
Color Imaging XVIII: Displaying, Processing, Hardcopy, and Applications
Reiner Eschbach; Gabriel G. Marcu; Alessandro Rizzi, Editor(s)