Lossless Intra Coding in HEVC with Integer-to-Integer DST

Abstract: It is desirable to support efficient lossless coding within video coding standards, which are primarily designed for lossy coding, with as little modification as possible. A simple approach is to skip transform and quantization, and directly entropy code the prediction residual, but this is inefficient for compression. A more efficient and popular approach is to process the residual block with DPCM prior to entropy coding. This paper explores an alternative approach based on processing the residual block with integer-to-integer (i2i) transforms. I2i transforms map integers to integers, however, unlike the integer transforms used in HEVC for lossy coding, they do not increase the dynamic range at the output and can be used in lossless coding. We use both an i2i DCT from the literature and a novel i2i approximation of the DST. Experiments with the HEVC reference software show competitive results.