Method and apparatus for video compression using block and wavelet techniques

[0002] This is a continuation of application Ser. No. 08/247,006, filed May 19, 1994, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,031,037.

[0003] 1. Field of the Invention

[0004] The present invention relates to the field of data compression.

[0005] 2. Background Art

[0006] Compression is a scheme for reducing the amount of information required to represent data. Data compression schemes are used, for example, to reduce the size of a data file so that it can be stored in a smaller memory space. Data compression may also be used to compress data prior to its transmission from one site to another, reducing the amount of time required to transmit the data. To access the compressed data, it is first decompressed into its original form. A compressor/decompressor (codec) is typically used to perform the compression and decompression of data. One measure of the performance or efficiency of a codec is its “compression ratio”. Compression ratio refers to the ratio of number of bits of uncompressed data to the number of bits of compressed data. Compression ratios may be 2:1, 3:1, 4:1 etc.

[0007] Data compression may also be required when the input/output rate of a particular data receiver is less than the data rate of the transmitted data. This can occur when providing video data to computer systems. Video data of frame size 320×240 is provided at rates approaching 7 megabytes per second. This rate is greater than the rate of commonly used I/O subsystems of personal computers. Some representative rates of common I/O subsystems found on personal computers (PC) are:

[0008] Another measure of video codec compression ratio is the average compressed bits-per-pixel. This measure is useful in describing video compression because different conventions are used for calculating the size of uncompressed video, i.e., some use 24 bits-per-pixel RGB and others use 4:2:2 subsampled YUV (16-bits per pixel). The averaging accounts for potentially different strategies employed for frames in a sequence. The bandwidth requirements for a sequence of frames is calculated by multiplying the average compressed bits-per-pixel and the number of frames per second, and dividing the resulting product by the number of pixels in each encoded frame.

[0009] Nearly all video compression techniques are lossy, i.e., information is inevitably discarded in the compression process. A measure of quality is how much this information is noticed by a human observer. However, there is not a consistent, objective model of human perception that can be applied. A simple, concrete, quality metric that is frequently used is the Mean-Squared-Error (MSE) that measures the error on a per-pixel basis from the uncompressed original.

[0010] Most compression algorithms are computationally complex, which limit their application since very complex algorithms often require expensive hardware to assist in the compression. A useful number to measure computational complexity of software-based compression algorithms is MIPS per megapixels/sec, i.e., essentially instructions/pixel. For example, an algorithm just capable of compressing 320×240 pixels per frame at 30 frames per second on a 40 MIPS machine has a computational complexity of 40,000,000/(320×240×30)≡17 instructions/pixel.

[0011] Symmetry refers to the ratio of the computational complexity of compression to that of decompression. Codec's are frequently designed with a greater computational load on the compressor than the decompressor, i.e., they are asymmetric. While this may be a reasonable strategy for “create-once, play-many” video sequences, it limits the range of applications for the codecs. Asymmetric compression techniques are not suitable for teleconferencing, for example, since teleconferencing requires essentially real-time processing and substantially equivalent compression and decompression rates.

[0012] Block Transform Coding Example (IPEG)

[0013] In the prior art, a class of image compressors called Block Transform Coding (BTC) is used. This is a fundamentally symmetric, image-compression technique that is used in (MPEG) and (JPEG) compression algorithms. In BTC, an image is divided into small blocks, the blocks are transformed using an invertible, two dimensional (2-D) mathematical transform, the transformed image is quantized, and the quantized result is losslessly compressed. This process forms the core of JPEG and MPEG compression, which use 8×8 blocks and a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to perform the 2-D transform.

[0014] FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating computational blocks of a prior art system for performing JPEG still-image, compression. Input image 102 is provided to the color-space conversion and subsampling block 110. The output of the color-space conversion and subsampling block 110 is provided to block 112 for dividing each image plane into 8×8 blocks. The output of block 114 is provided to the Discrete Cosine Transform block 114. Block 114 provides DC terms 116 to quantization block 120, which quantizes the DC terms 116 using differential pulse code modulation (DPCM). Block 114 provides AC terms 118 to block 122, which scalar quantizes the AC terms 118 by frequency. The outputs of blocks 120 and 122 are provided to the Huffman block 124, which compresses the quantized values using variable length codes to provide output 126.

[0015] Digital images 102 are typically stored in an RGB format, where each pixel is represented as a tuple of red (R), green (G), and blue (B) samples. While RGB format is suited towards most digital color input and output devices, it is not particularly efficient for the human visual system, or natural scenes. For example, in natural scenes the R, G, and B components of colors are highly correlated because most natural colors are very close to shades of gray, where R=G=B (i.e., saturated colors are rare). In other words, with respect to information coding,.the correlation between RGB signals means that there is redundant information stored in the R, G, and B channels. To account for this redundant information, color-space conversion and subsampling block 110 transforms the colors of input image 102 into a color space with an explicit brightness, or luminance, dimension prior to compression. More bits are typically used to precisely specify the brightness while relatively fewer bits are used to specify the chrominance.

[0016] Broadcast television (TV) uses YUV color space to better utilize the bandwidth of TV's. The YUV color space is essentially a rotation of the RGB basis vectors so that the luminance axis (Y) of YUV color space is aligned with the gray diagonal of RGB color space, which extends from RGB coordinates (0, 0, 0) to (1, 1, 1). The transformation for converting RGB color values to YUV space is expressed by Equation (1): $\begin{array}{cc}\left[\begin{array}{c}Y\\ U\\ V\end{array}\right]=\left[\begin{array}{ccc}0.161& 0.315& 0.061\\ -0.079& -0.155& 0.234\\ 0.330& -0.227& -0.053\end{array}\right]\left[\begin{array}{c}R\\ G\\ B\end{array}\right].& \left(1\right)\end{array}$

[0017] Reduction of redundant information can be achieved using the YUV color-space representation obtained using Equation (1). The human eye is much less sensitive to spatial detail in the U and V channels than it is in the Y channel because receptors in the eye for brightness (Y) are more numerous than those for chrominance (U, V). Using this fact, the U and V components can be sampled at a lower resolution. In JPEG compression, the U and V components are frequently subsampled by a factor of 2 in both x- and y-directions. For example, four Y samples and one sample each of U and V are produced for each 2×2 block of an input image. For 8-bit samples per channel, this effectively produces a 2:1 compression factor. Thus, color-space conversion and subsampling block 110 converts an input image 102 from RGB color space to YUV color space using the transformation of Equation (1) and subsamples the input image 102 to reduce redundant information.

[0018] Once block 110 converts the input image 102 to YUV color space and subsamples the U and V planes, the prior art JPEG system of FIG. 1 treats the resulting three image planes (Y, U, and V) independently and codes them as three separate 1-channel images. Subsampling of U and V values reduces the amount of computation performed here as well.

[0019] For each of the resulting YUV image planes, block 112 of FIG. 1 segments the image output by color-space conversion and subsampling block 110 into fixed-size tiles, or blocks. In JPEG compression; the image is divided into blocks of 8×8 pixels for a number of reasons. Many transforms have non-linear, computational complexity that is alleviated by small block sizes. For example, the computational complexity of a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), described below, is O(nlog(n)). Therefore, transforming small, fixed-sized blocks allows the overall compression algorithm to remain approximately linear in image size. The relatively small blocks localize compression artifacts in an image, i.e., the artifacts from a block that is particularly difficult to compress do not ripple throughout the image. Finally, small, fixed block sizes facilitate easier, hardwired optimization.

[0020] Once the image is segmented into 8×8 blocks, a spatial transform is performed on each block. In the prior art JPEG system of FIG. 1, block 116 performs a Discrete Cosine Transform on each block of the three image planes provided by block 112. The DCT of block 114 is lossless resulting in 64 frequency values for each block. The first value produced by block 114 is a DC term 116 that is essentially the average YUV value of an 8×8 block. The remaining values are AC terms 118 that represent edges in the x- and y-directions. The transform “sorts” the block into detail components. Eight-by-eight blocks of an image plane that are relatively smooth have large values for the DC term 116 and lower frequency AC terms 118 and relatively little energy in the higher frequency AC terms 118. Blocks with strong vertical detail have considerable energy in the horizontal frequencies and comparatively little in the vertical.

[0021] Once block 114 produces DC term 116 and AC terms 118, DPCM quantization block 120 and scalar quantization block 122 quantize the resulting frequency terms 116 and 118, respectively. The DC term 116 is processed separately. It is not quantized directly, but rather its difference from the DC term of the previous block is quantized by block 120 using Differential Pulse Code Modulation coding, or DPCM. In Block Transform Coding, differential pulse code modulation of the DC term 116 takes advantage of block-to-block color correlations and maintains higher precision for the DC term 116. The low frequencies of AC terms 118 are quantized finely by block 122, since much of the image energy is contained there, and the higher frequencies of AC terms 118 are quantized more coarsely by block 122 using scalar quantization.

[0022] In JPEG, variable-length coding block 124 encodes the entropy of DC term 116 and AC terms 118 after quantization by blocks 120 and 122, respectively. The quantized DCT coefficients 116 and 118 are losslessly compressed using a variable-length, Huffman-like code. The quantized DC term 116 is coded individually with a code that is short for small differences and longer for large differences between block values. The sixty-three AC terms. 118 are coded into a continuous bitstream, scanned in zig-zag order, with special run-length codes referring to runs of zero. The special treatment of zero-valued AC codes 118 is important because little of the image energy is located in the higher frequency terms of the DCT performed by block 114, and thus there is a high probability that many of the highfrequency AC terms 118 are zero.

[0023] The prior art JPEG compression has several disadvantages. While the JPEG techniques provides high compression ratios for still-images, it is not suitable for many real-time software-based video applications. JPEG is not capable of providing 320×240×24 fps (or 1.8 Mps) using generally available PC's due to the computational complexity. Because JPEG is a still-image standard, it cannot provide video rate compression with moderate compression using software. Instead, special hardware is required to provide JPEG compression at video rates. that can support the above rate of 1.8 Mps. This is due to the computational complexity of performing a Discrete Cosiie Transform on an 8×8 block. MPEG compression provides video compression. While MPEG has same basic format as JPEG, it is an asymmetric compression method using special hardware that requires significantly greater compression time than decompression time, and is therefore unsuitable for providing real-time, symmetric video compression and decompression.

[0024] The present invention provides a method and apparatus for symmetrically compressing and decompressing video information in real time by coupling block and wavelet techniques. The present invention performs a wavelet transform on small blocks of an image and encodes the wavelet transformed blocks. The preferred embodiment of the present invention utilizes a block-oriented Haar wavelet transform on 2-by-2 pixel blocks and is useful in a wide variety of video coding applications.

[0025] In the compression pipeline, the image is divided into a plurality of blocks, where each block of pixels comprises 2^k×2^kpixels. In the preferred embodiment of the present invention, k is equal to one. The average color of each block of the plurality of blocks is computed. The present invention computes an average luminance of each block dependent on the average color of each block and a differential luminance of each pixel of the plurality of pixels of each block. A first plurality of frequency details of each block are determined by Haar transforming the differential luminance of each pixel of the plurality of pixels of each block. The first plurality of frequency details comprises an average term, a horizontal term, a vertical term, and a diagonal term. The present invention computes an average color difference between each block and the block that immediately precedes it, and then quantizes the average color difference and the first plurality of frequency details. The average color difference and the first plurality of frequency details are quantized using Lloyd-Max quantization, which is dependent on a variance and a number of reconstruction levels. In an alternate embodiment of the present invention, skip codes are generated when the quantized average color difference and the second plurality of frequency details of the block match those of the corresponding block in a previous frame. The quantized average color difference and a second plurality of frequency details are encoded using variable length codes; the second plurality of frequency details is less than or equal to the first plurality of frequency details. The second plurality of frequency details comprises the horizontal term and the vertical term. In the preferred embodiment of the present invention, the quantized average color and the second plurality of frequency details are encoded using Huffman coding.

[0026] The present invention employs lookup tables to decompress video information and to format output pixels. The output of the compression pipeline containing variable length codes is first decoded into fixed-length codes. The fixed-length codes are then decoded into five device-independent components that represent a 2×2 block using a first lookup table. The five components hCode, vCode, and a set of three compVals (RGB, described below) are provided as indices to a second lookup table containing precomputed values of R, G, and B components. The R, G, and B components of the second lookup table include precomputed display dependent formatting to produce the output image. In an alternate embodiment, skip codes contained in the output of the variable length decoder are decoded. Thus, the operations of reconstruction, inverse Haar transform, clamping, and dithering are reduced to a few table lookups. The per-pixel ope ration count is only 5-6 operations per pixel.

[0027] FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating a prior system implementing JPEG compression;

[0028] FIG. 2 is a diagram illustrating the compression pipeline of the present invention;

[0029] FIG. 3 is a diagram illustrating a Laplacian distribution according to the present invention;

[0030] FIG. 4 is a diagram illustrating the seven components representing a 2×2 block that are produced by blocks 214 and 216 of FIG. 2 in the compression pipeline of the present invention;

[0031] FIG. 5 is a diagram illustrating the six components representing a 2×2 block that are produced by blocks 214, 216, and 218 in the compression pipeline of the present invention;

[0032] FIG. 6 is a diagram illustrating the five components representing a 2×2 block that are produced by blocks 214, 216, 218, 220 and 222 in the compression pipeline of the present invention;

[0033] FIG. 7 is a diagram illustrating four microwavelet blocks of an image frame including a skip code; and

[0034] FIG. 8 is a diagram illustrating the decompression pipeline of the present invention.

[0035] The present invention provides a method and apparatus for compressing video information using microwavelets. In the following description, numerous specific details, such as block sizes, color spaces, etc., are described in detail to provide a more thorough description of this invention. It will be apparent, however, to one skilled in the art, that the invention maybe practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well known features have not been described in detail so as not to unnecessarily obscure the present invention.

[0036] The present invention symmetrically compresses and decompresses video information in real-time by effectively coupling block techniques with wavelet techniques. The present invention performs a wavelet transform on small blocks of an image and encodes the wavelet transformed blocks in a highly efficient manner. Thus, the present invention is a real-time, symmetric compressor/decompressor scheme that utilizes a block-oriented Haar wavelet transform on 2-by-2 pixel blocks, in the preferred embodiment, which provides desired performance and compression ratios.

[0037] The video compression scheme of the present invention is a high performance, moderate bit-rate, video compression technique that offers significant advantages over prior art software compression technologies and is useful in a wide variety of video coding applications. Unlike many other prior art video-compression technologies that are software-based, the compressed video of the present invention can be compressed and decompressed in real time using commonly available processing means used in personal computers (PC).

[0038] The present invention provides symmetrical compression and decompression that are on the same order of magnitude in computational complexity with modest compression rates. It provides compression ratios of 1.5-2.5 bits per pixel. Further, the present invention plays back video information at 320×240×24 fps (or 1.8 Mps) using PC's and provides high quality video. The advantages of the present invention make it suitable for a wide range of applications. Since the technique is symmetrical, applications such as teleconferencing are enabled. Further, it provides the advantages of asymmetric software approaches with respect to decompression.

[0039] BTC Approach of the Present Invention

[0040] The basic approach of the present invention is to provide an improved coding approach based on the Block Transform Coding so that real-time software compression and decompression are feasible. To meet performance goals, the present invention processes each pixel of an image using less than 20 operations per pixel. In order to provide real-time compression/decompression, a YUV transform as taught in the prior art is not performed. For playback, the prior art YUV-to-RGB conversion requires five multiplications and four additions, not including output formatting (dithering) as well as memory loads and stores. Thus, the conversion uses essentially half of the computational budget of 20 operations per pixel.

[0041] Another consideration affecting decoding time is output formatting. The target playback platforms may have various display formats: 24-bit RGB, 15-bit RGB, 8-bit grayscale, etc. For example, a common color display used is 12-bit RGB. To provide suitable image quality, the present invention dithers the device independent compressed video information. That is, the compressed data of the present invention is not dependent on a particular display format. Thus, even an optimized 24-bit to 12-bit RGB dithering conversion typically requires 10 operations per pixel. It is accordingly apparent that color-space conversion and dithering can consume the entire computational budget. Therefore, as described below, the present provides precomputed output formatting incorporated in lookup tables used to decompress encoded video information.

[0042] FIG. 2 is a diagram illustrating the compression pipeline of the present invention for compressing video information using wavelets. An RGB image 210 is provided as input to block 212, which divides the image into 2^k×2^kblocks. In the preferred embodiment, k is equal to one, i.e., 2×2 blocks are used. The 2×2 blocks are output to block 214, which computes the average RGB value (R_avg, B_avg, and G_avg) of each 2×2 block. The output of block 214 is coupled to the input of block 216, which computes the average luminance value Y_blockof each 2×2 block and the differential luminances ΔY for each pixel of a block, described below.

[0043] The output of block 216 is coupled to the input of Haar transformation block 218, which performs a Haar transform of the ΔY values of each 2×2 block. The output of Haar transform block 218 is coupled to the input of block 220 for computing the differences (ΔR_avg, ΔB_avg, and ΔG_avg) between the average RGB values of the present 2×2 block and the average RGB values of the previous 2×2 block.

[0044] The output of block 220 is coupled to the input of Lloyd-Max quantization block 222, which quantizes the Haar transform values H2_hor, H3_ver, and H4_dia(described below) and the RGB differences ΔR_avg, ΔB_avg, and ΔG_avg. The output of Lloyd-Max quantization block 222 is coupled to the input of variable-length coding block 224. In the preferred embodiment of the present invention, Huffman coding is implemented to perform variable length encoding of the six data H2_hor, H3_ver, H4_dia, ΔR_avg, ΔB_avg, and ΔG_avgrepresenting each 2×2 block to produce output 226.

[0045] In FIG. 2, skip code block 223 may be inserted between the output of block 222 and variable-length coding block 224. The skip code block 223 is indicated by an asterisk beside the numeral 223 and the block itself is dashed instead of solid. In a first embodiment for producing symmetrically compressed still-images, the output of Lloyd-Max quantization block 222 is coupled to the input of variable length coding block 224 to produce output 226, while in a second embodiment, skip code block 226 is inserted between the two blocks to provide temporal compression of video information using skip codes, described below.

[0046] The present invention works on image blocks of 2×2 pixels. Block 212 parses the input image 210 into 2^k×2^kblocks of pixels. For each 2×2 block, block 214 computes a full-precision, average (DC) RGB value, i.e., R_avg, G_avg, and B_avg, to represent its color value. In block 216, unlike the prior art, the present invention does not use a full YUV-to-RGB conversion in block 216. Instead, block 216 uses a modified YUV-to-RGB technique that retains the compression advantages of treating luminance and chrominance information differently. As described below, lookup tables and a small block size are used, thereby allowing output formatting to be precomputed in lookup tables and not calculated for each pixel.

[0047] FIG. 4 is a diagram illustrating the seven components representing a 2×2 block that are produced by blocks 214 and 216 in the compression pipeline of the present invention. The 2×2 block 410 comprising pixel1401, pixel2402, pixel3403, and pixel 4404 is produced by block 212 from input image 210. The 2×2 block is provided to block 214, which produces DC RGB value 420. While DC RGB value 420 is represented as a single block in FIG. 4, it should be apparent that DC RGB value 420 comprises three components, i.e., an R_avg, G_avg, and B_avgcomponent. The 2×2 block 410 and DC RGB value 420 are provided to block 216, which computes Y_blockvalue and the ΔY's. In FIG. 4, ΔY1430, ΔY2431, ΔY3432, and ΔY4433 represent the differential luminances between each particular luminance value of a pixel and the average luminance value Y_block. The respective differential luminances are indicated in the diagram by a corresponding lighter colored block within the larger block. Thus, the differential luminance ΔY1 is indicated by lightened block 430 in the upper left hand portion of the block (illustrated below DC RGB block 420) corresponding to the position of pixel1401 of 2×2 block 410. The ΔY2431, ΔY3432, and ΔY4433 values are illustrated in the upper right, lower left, and lower right portion of blocks (illustrated in descending order below the block containing ΔY1430), respectively. Output 440illustrates the 2×2 block 410 as represented by DC RGB block 420, ΔY1430, ΔY2431, ΔY3432, and ΔY4433 produced by blocks 214 and 216.

[0048] The term ΔY is the luminance Y difference between each pixel and the average luminance Y_blockfor the corresponding block, i.e., ΔY₁=Y₁−Y_block. Effectively, this block structure is equivalent to chroma subsampling by a factor of two in the x- and y-directions. Only luminance Y information is available on a per-pixel basis, and full color information is only present on a per-block basis: ΔY₁, ΔY₂, ΔY₃, ΔY₄, R_avg, G_avg, and B_avg. At the output of block 216, seven components, or bytes, remain to represent the block, which is down from the original 4 pixels×3 bytes per pixel 12 bytes of the original RGB image for 24-bit RGB color. Using this approach, the present invention maintains the compression advantages of a YUV-pixel transformation and U, V subsampling without explicitly performing it on a per-pixel basis.

[0049] Once the blocks are preprocessed, as described above, the number of components is additionally reduced by performing a simple, two-dimensional transform of the ΔY values. The two-dimensional transform is performed on the luminance values instead of the full precision color of pixels. For the two-dimensional transform, the present invention performs a 2^k-by-2^kHaar transform (a second-order wavelet transform) that is very fast when applied to 2^k-by-2^kblocks. In block 218 of FIG. 2, a Haar transform of ΔY values of each 2×2 block is performed. Within the 2×2 block, only AC luminance variations (i.e., ΔY's) are encoded. In the present invention, the transform involves values for 2^k=2, 4, 8, etc., where a low integer for k is preferred. In the preferred embodiment of the present invention, the integer k is equal to one (i.e., 2^k=2), so that the wavelet transform is performed on blocks of 2×2 pixels as follows in Equation (2): $\begin{array}{cc}\left[\begin{array}{c}{\mathrm{H1}}_{\mathrm{avg}}\\ {\mathrm{H2}}_{\mathrm{hor}}\\ {\mathrm{H3}}_{\mathrm{ver}}\\ {\mathrm{H4}}_{\mathrm{dia}}\end{array}\right]=\left[\begin{array}{cccc}1& 1& 1& 1\\ 1& 1& -1& -1\\ 1& -1& 1& -1\\ 1& -1& -1& 1\end{array}\right]\left[\begin{array}{c}\Delta Y_1\\ \Delta Y_2\\ \Delta Y_3\\ \Delta Y_4\end{array}\right]·& \left(2\right)\end{array}$

[0050] Because the initial ΔY's are the differences ΔY₁-ΔY₄between the luminance Y₁-Y₄of each corresponding pixel and the average luminance Y_blockfor the 2×2 block, the first term H1_avgof the transform is always equal to zero. Therefore, it is unnecessary to store this transform term. The second term H2_horand the third term H3_verof the transform are the horizontal- and vertical-edge components of the 2×2 block, respectively. The last term H4_diais the diagonal-edge component of the 2×2 block. Using the Haar transform, an additional component is eliminated (i.e., H1_avg), and six components (each one byte) averages.

[0051] FIG. 5 is a diagram illustrating the six components representing a 2×2 block that are produced by blocks 214, 216, and 218 in the compression pipeline of the present invention. The 2×2 block 410 is produced by block 212. The second column contains the seven components DC RGB block 420, ΔY1430, ΔY2431, ΔY3432, and ΔY4433 produced by blocks 214 and 216 and provided at the output of block 216 in the compression pipeline, as described above with respect to FIG. 4. A two-dimensional transform given by Equation (1) is performed in block 218 on the ΔY1430, ΔY2431, ΔY3432, and ΔY4433 values to produce H1_avg, H2_hor, H3_ver, and H4_dia. As described above, the H1_avgis eliminated. The third column illustrates the six components representing block 210 at the output of Haar transform block 218. Three components encode the DC RGB value 510; it should be understood that DC RGB value 510 has the same values as the RGB values of DC RGB value 420 shown in column 2 and renumbered here for purposes of illustration. Block 512 represents the H2_horterm, block 514 represents the H3_verterm, and block 516 represents the H4_diaterm. Output 540 illustrates the 2×2 block 410 as represented by DC RGB block 510 produced by block 214 and H2_hor, H3_ver, and H4_diaterms 512, 514, and 516 produced by Haar transform block 218.

[0052] In block 220 of FIG. 2, the differences between the average RGB values (ΔR_avg, ΔG_avg, and ΔB_avg) of the present 2×2 block and the previous one are computed. This exploits the block-to-block coherence of DC RGB values and makes all six block components difference-based, i.e., H2_hor, H3_ver, H4_dia, ΔR_avg, ΔG_avg, and ΔB_avg. The most common DC RGB difference value for all 2×2 blocks of an image is zero.

[0053] After the Haar transform is applied to the 2×2 blocks of the image and the DC RGB differences are calculated, each of the six data components (i.e., ΔR_avg, ΔG_avg, ΔB_avg, H2_hor, H3_ver, and H4_dia) are quantized individually in block 220 of FIG. 2. Because each component is based on a difference between two correlated values, the distribution of values is expected to be roughly Laplacian, i.e., it has a sharp peak at zero (the most probable value) and exponentially falls off in a symmetric manner on either side of the origin. The Laplacian distribution is described by a single paranmeter, σ, which is the variance of the distribution. A standard value of σ for each of the six components of a 2×2 microwavelet block was heuristically determined using a set of test images. The distributions are optimally quantized dependent on these standard a values using the Lloyd-Max quantization technique in block 220 of FIG. 2. The Lloyd-Max technique calculates decision points and reconstruction values dependent on a Laplacian distribution, the value of σ, and the desired number of reconstruction levels. Because zero is the most common value in the distributions, zero-centered, symmetric, reconstruction values having an odd number of levels is used. For example, Table 1 lists the data quantizers used in the present invention with 2×2 microwavelet blocks:

[0054] In Table 1, there is only one quantization level for the H4_diadiagonal-edge component. Since this component is not common, the present invention assumes that the H4_diacomponent is equal to zero. Thus, only five components are used to represent the 2×2 microwavelet block: ΔR_avg, ΔG_avg, ΔB_avg, H2_hor, and H3_ver. The five components are output by Lloyd-Max quantization block 222 of FIG. 2 as a 16-bit code, described below.

[0055] FIG. 3 is a diagram illustrating a Laplacian distribution according to the present invention including decision points and recoinstruction levels. Table 1 lists decision and reconstruction points for ΔR_avg, ΔG_avg, ΔB_avg, H2_hor, H3_ver, and H4_dia. The Laplacian distribution is fully characterized by a value for the variance σ, as indicated in the third column of Table 1. The Laplacian distribution is centered on a mean value of zero in each case. The diagram illustrates the decision points and reconstruction levels for quantizing a data term. The horizontal axis of FIG. 3 illustrates decision points to the left of the distribution mean while reconstruction levels are illustrated to the right of it. The values for decision points and reconstruction levels for each data term are listed in columns 4 and 5, respectively, for a variance value a and a known number of reconstruction levels.

[0056] In the present invention, the reconstruction levels of Lloyd-Max quantization block 222 are chosen so that the total number of reconstruction levels for a given 2×2 microwavelet block can be stored in two bytes, i.e., 2¹⁶=65536 levels. By multiplying out the total number of reconstruction levels from each row in the chart (13×15×13×5×5×1=63375), it is apparent that the 2×2 block can be stored in two bytes. Thus, the four pixels of a 2×2 block are effectively compressed into a 16-bit code output by block 222, compressing each pixel into 4-bits per pixel. Approximately 2000 extra 16-bit codes remain unused in the code space that can be used for further compression, described below.

[0057] FIG. 6 is a diagram illustrating the five components representing a 2×2 block that are produced by blocks 214, 216, 218, 220 and 222 in the compression pipeline of the present invention. The 2×2 block 410 is produced by blocks 212. The second column contains the seven components DC RGB block 420, ΔY1430, ΔY2431, ΔY3432, and ΔY4433, as described above with respect to FIG. 4. The third column contains the six components DC RGB block 510 and the H2_hor, H3_ver, and H4_diaterms 512, 514, and 516, as described above with respect to FIG. 5. The differential DC RGB values 610 are determined in block 220 and the six difference values are quantized in the Lloyd-Max quantization block 222. Further, the H4_diais eliminated from the output since it has only a single reconstruction level. The fourth column illustrates the five components representing 2×2 block 410 at the output of Lloyd-Max quantization block 222. Three components encode the difference DC RGB values 610 (ΔR_avg, ΔG_avg, and ΔB_avg) produced by block 220 and quantized by Lloyd-Max quantization block 222 of FIG. 2. Block 612 represents the quantized H2_horterm and block 614 represents the quantized H3_verterm output by Lloyd-Max quantization block 222. Output 640 illustrates the 2×2 block 410 as represented by quantized differential DC RGB values 610 (ΔR_avg, ΔG_avg, and ΔB_avg) and the quantized H2_horand H3_verterms 612 and 614 at the output of Lloyd-Max quantization block 222.

[0058] The next stage in the compression pipeline of the present invention is to compress the 16-bit block codes losslessly via variable-length Huffman codes in block 224 of FIG. 2. The output of Lloyd-Max quantization block 222 is coupled to variable-length coding block 224. Because each of the five components (ΔR_avg, ΔG_avg, ΔB_avg, H2_hor, and H3_ver) of the microwavelet-block code is strongly biased towards zero, the resulting 16-bit codes output by Lloyd-Max quantization block 222 are distributed in a highly non-uniform manner. A canonical code-word probability distribution and the corresponding Huffman codes were heuristically determined using test images in the preferred embodiment of the present invention. The variable-length Huffman coding of block 224 provides another compression factor of 2-3 to produce output 226. Thus, the present invention using microwavelets provides a compression rate of 1.5-2.5 bits per pixel at block 224, which yields a compression ratio between 9.6:1 and 16:1.

[0059] Temporal Compression of the Present Invention

[0060] To provide temporal compression, the present invention uses skip codes in block 223, which is indicated with a dashed line. Skip codes are inserted by the block encoder of the present invention in block 226 whenever it is determined that a 2×2 microwavelet block of a frame is sufficiently similar to the corresponding 2×2 microwavelet block of the previous frame. The present invention uses a number of codes of the extra 2000 codes in the upper portion of the code space. There is a code to skip one block, another to skip two blocks, and so on. These codes are then passed through the Huffman stage 224 as normal 2×2 microwavelet block codes. When skip codes are present, Huffman tables include their probability.

[0061] Decompression

[0062] The present invention provides a particularly efficient software implementation for performing video decompression. Since the block code only comprises 16 bits, the present invention is able to employ a lookup table to decode the block directly into its separate components. Further, tables can be used to precompute thedithered display pixels from the component values. Dithering is required to reduce the effects of quantization noise produced when converting from a device independent color format to a device dependent format. For instance, when converting from 24-bit RGB to 12-bit RGB values, dithering is used to reduce quantization noise. The present invention advantageously folds the dithering into decompression lookup table entries. That is, the dithering effects are precomputed and do not have to be calculated during decompression of the present invention. The decompression algorithm is described below.

[0063] FIG. 8 is a diagram illustrating the decompression pipeline of the present invention for decompressing video. information using wavelets. The compressed image 226 is provided as input to a variable length code decompressor 810, which decodes the variable length codes of output 226 into fixed-length, 16-bit codes. In the preferred embodiment, block 810 is a Huffman decoder. The output of block 810 is provided to block 820, which decodes the fixed-length code into five device-independent components that represent a 2×2 block using a first lookup table. The five components hCode, vCode, compVal_r, compVal_g, and compVal_b(described below) are provided to block 830 as indices to a second lookup table in block 830. In block 830, the components output by block 820 are used to index lookup table entries containing precomputed values of R, G, and B components. The R, G, and B components of the second lookup table include precomputed display dependent formatting to produce output image 840. In FIG. 8, skip code decoder 815 may be inserted between the output of block 810 and 16-bit decoding block 820. The skip code decoder. 815 is indicated by an asterisk beside the numeral 815 and the block itself is dashed instead of solid.

[0064] The output 226 of the compression pipeline is first Huffinan decoded. That is, the variable length codes of output 226 are decompressed to produce 16-bit fixed length microwavelet block codes. In the embodiment of the present invention using skip code block 223 in the compression pipeline of FIG. 2, the skip codes incorporated in the 16-bit fixed length microwavelet block codes are decompressed. In a simple skip code embodiment of the present invention, the skip code references a previously processed microwavelet block that is copied to the present frame. When the skip code references a microwavelet block code in a relatively distant location in a video frame, artifacts may be introduced at the present block location in the decompressed video frame since the DC RGB value of the microwavelet block immediately preceding the present microwavelet block may have a significantly different value than that of the DC RGB value of the preceding block of the skip-code referenced block. This is due to the differential encoding of the DC RGB values. FIG. 7 is a diagram illustrating four microwavelet blocks 704, 706, 714, and 716 of image frame 710. The currently processed microwavelet block 716 is represented by a skip code 730 referencing 2×2 block 710. An artifact in the decompressed frame may be introduced since the DC RGB value of 2×2 block 716 is dependent upon the DC RGB value of 2×2 block 714, whereas that of 2×2 block 706 is dependent upon the DC RGB value of 2×2 block 704. In another embodiment of the present invention, repeat skip codes may be practiced that reduces the effects of overshoot in the DC RGB value of a 2×2 block encoded with a skip code.

[0065] In the entropy decoding block 810 of FIG. 8, tables are also used to optimize the variable-length Huffman decoding. The present invention ensures that there are no Huffman codes larger than 16-bits. This allows the present invention to perform a lookup on the next 16 bits of the code stream to determine which Huffman code is present. The lookup operation also specifies how many bits were used from the 16 in put bits. A special escape code is reserved and all rare codes for which a normal Huffman code would use more than 16-bits. All rare codes are mapped to the escape code, and their decoded value is encoded literally in the bitstream after the escape code. One useful optimization of this approach allows more than one block code to be recovered per Huffman lookup. Often, the 16 input bits actually contain two or more Huffman codes, and this is handled by each table entry containing a list of output codes. This optimization also permits a Huffman encoder to use “pair codes” where one Huffman code corresponds to two decoded values.

[0066] In the present invention two tables are used to decompress the output of the Huffman decoder 810 (or the skip code decompressor in the alternate embodiment): a decodeTable and a packTable. The decodeTable of block 820 in FIG. 8 is a 63375 entry lookup table having one entry for each block code, which produces a (quintuple) of values that represent the 2×2 block. The table entries in the decodeTable are small structures decoding the five microwavelet components of the 2×2 block. The packTable of block 830 is indexed by a triplet of values produced from the decodeTable: hcode, vcode, and compval. The value hcode is the quantization index for the H2_horcomponent of the block; it has a value ranging front 0-4. Similarly, the value vcode is a quantization index of the vertical Haar wavelet component H3_ver, it also has a value ranging from 0-4. The twenty-five possible combinations of (vCode, hCode) completely define the luminance detail of the 2×2 block. The value compval is a scalar R, G, or B component value expressed in a range from 0-128. Because of the DPCM approach used in encoding the DC RGB components, the actual decoded values can overflow the 0-128 range. For this reason the packTable actually has 192 compVal entries and can be indexed from −32 to 160. Thus the total number of entries in the packTable is equal to 5×5×192=4800 entries. Each element in the packTable contains red, green, and blue pre-formatted 2×2 output pixels. The component values are pre-shifted so that the component pixels can be logically OR'ed together to create an output pixel. Since the entries in the packTable completely specify the subblock variations, both dithering and edge-term reconstruction (inverse Haar transform) are precomputed in the table.

[0067] Table 2 illustrates code written in the C programming language for 2×2 block decoding into 16-bit RGB pixels:

[0068] In Table 2, the loop constructs two output 32-bit words: p12 and p34. The word p12 is the top two 16-bit pixels of the block, i.e., pixels 1 and 2 which are the upper left and upper right pixels, respectively. The word p34 is the bottom two pixels accordingly. The pixels are constructed by OR'ing together component values fetched from the packTable. The decodeTable stores a single index, d->e, for the edge-terms; the index is basically a number ranging from 0-24 and scaled up by 192, i.e., d->e=hCode×vCode×192. The single index d->e is the starting point of the area in the packTable corresponding to the component values for a 2×2 block. These twenty-five cases completely determine the sub-block detail. Also, the tracking variables dr, dg, and db actually track pointer indexes into the packTable in such a way that a single addition moves from the decoded red value entry in the packTable to the green value, and so on. This is accomplished by constructing the decodeTable entries as follows in Equations (3)-(5):

[0069] d->r=ΔR_avg*sizeof(packTableEntry),  (3)

[0070] d->g=(ΔG_avg−ΔR_avg)*sizeof(packTableEntry),  (4)

[0071] and

[0072] d->b=(ΔB_avg−ΔG_avg)*sizeof(packTableEntry).  (5)

[0073] Thus, through the use of tables, the operations of reconstruction, inverse Haar transform, clamping, and dithering are reduced to a few table lookups. The per-block operation count for the loop illustrated in Table 2 is about 20-25 operations. Since the loop emits a four-pixel block, this is only 5-6 operations per pixel, well within the computational budget. However, entropy decoding must still be considered.

[0074] Thus, a method and apparatus for compressing video information that provides real-time symmetry and effectively couples block techniques with wavelet techniques are described.