Compression scheme for digital cinema application

Abstract

In this paper we present a compression scheme for the Digital Cinema application. Specifically, we developed a rate allocation algorithm for applying JPEG-2000 to coding Digital Cinema movies to achieve near lossless and smooth visual picture quality over the decoded movies at the required coding rate. First, a rate-distortion model is established based on the estimated source characteristics of the pictures, and a rate allocation algorithm is derived to determine a target rate for each picture based on the model so that 1) the overall distortion is minimized and 2) each picture has the same distortion at the required average bit rate. Then JPEG-2000 is employed to encode the high resolution motion picture according to the target rate allocation to achieve efficient compression performance and smooth picture quality over the picture sequence. The test results on Digital Cinema movie clips have shown that our scheme has achieved visually lossless coding performance and very smooth picture quality both visually and in PSNR.