Efficiency of shape-adaptive 2-D transforms for coding of arbitrarily shaped image segments

We introduce a formula to compute an optimum 2-D shape-adaptive Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT) suitable for coding pels in arbitrarily-shaped image segments. The efficiency of the KLT on a 2-D AR(1) process is used to benchmark two other shape-adaptive transforms described in literature. It is shown that the optimum KLT significantly outperforms the well known shape-adaptive DCT method introduced by Gilge et al. (1989) for coding Segments of arbitrary shape in intraframe coding mode. A statistical transform gain close to the Gilge-method can be achieved with a shape-adaptive DCT algorithm introduced by Sikora and Makai (see Proc. Workshop Image Anal. Image Coding, Berlin, FRG, Nov. 1993) which is implemented with much lower complexity.>