Advanced HEVC Screen Content Coding for MPEG Immersive Video

This paper presents the modified HEVC Screen Content Coding (SCC) that was adapted to be more efficient as an internal video coding of the MPEG Immersive Video (MIV) codec. The basic, unmodified SCC is already known to be useful in such an application. However, in this paper, we propose three additional improvements to SCC to increase the efficiency of immersive video coding. First, we analyze using the quarter-pel accuracy in the intra block copy technique to provide a more effective search of the best candidate block to be copied in the encoding process. The second proposal is the use of tiles to allow inter-view prediction inside MIV atlases. The last proposed improvement is the addition of the MIV bitstream parser in the HEVC encoder that enables selecting the most efficient coding configuration depending on the type of currently encoded data. The experimental results show that the proposal increases the compression efficiency for natural content sequences by almost 7% and simultaneously decreases the computational time of encoding by more than 15%, making the proposal very valuable for further research on immersive video coding.