Improved Moving Picture Compression Using H.264/AVC and Run-Level Coding

Based on theoretical analysis of the H.264 video coder and decoder patents, a fast, easy-to-implement and efficient compression scheme for moving picture is proposed, combining the well-known Run-level compression with the original H.264 compression standard. It is shown that the proposed scheme preserves the visual quality of the video captures, while improving the compression performance. Comparisons with other well-known video formats such as AVI, ASF and MPEG support that the proposed scheme is not only comparable in terms of quality but superior in terms of the achieved compression rate. As the proposed scheme employs a simple and quick lossless algorithmic addition to the existing H.264, which has pool of 1135 patents in 44 countries, the compression benefits can be widespread, without sacrificing quality nor incurring significant increase in compression time, making it a practical solution when additional compression is required during transmission. Keywords: Video compression, runlength coding, compression performance, H.264, transmission efficiency