VISUALLY LOSSLESS VIDEO DATA COMPRESSION

摘要

An apparatus and method of performing YUV (or YCrCb) video compression prior to storage within a memory and decompression upon retrieval of the blocks from memory. Compression is performed utilizing a quantizer to compress vide o data to a desired overall compression ratio R, even though the luma and chro ma contributions to compression can differ for each subblock, each preferably selected in response to texture estimation. Selections are made for each subblock to perform either linear or non-linear quantization during compression. Compression is performed without utilizing data from blocks outside of the block being compressed, wherein video blocks can be retrieved and decompressed in any desired order. In one implementation, an encoder non-sequentially selects blocks from memory which are then decompressed and encoded. The compression may be beneficially utilized in a number of different video transmission and storage applications without departing from the invention.