Block adaptive selection of multiple core transforms for video coding

Transform coding tools in video coding have traditionally relied on the Discrete Cosine Transform Type II (DCT-II) to map residual signals to a new domain where quantization and entropy coding tools achieve a better coding efficiency than in the spatial domain. However, the DCT-II is not sufficient to model all different types of residual signals efficiently, especially in the intra-predicted blocks case. For this reason, the DST-VII was introduced in H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) in order to improve the compression performance of 4 × 4 intra-predicted blocks. In this paper we propose a multiple core transform approach, in which each transform is separable and generated by combining two one-dimensional transforms for the vertical and horizontal directions. The pair of 1-D transforms is selected from a set of three different types of Discrete Trigonometric Transforms and the Identity Transformation. Test results show that the proposed algorithm achieves bit rate reductions of 3% on average with respect to HEVC for intra-predicted residuals.