Analysis and encoder prevention techniques for pathological IDCT drift accumulation in static video scenes

This paper discusses the problem of severe pathological encoder-decoder IDCT drift in video compression coding when using a very small quantization step size and typical encoding techniques to encode video sequences with areas of completely static source content. We suggest that there are two ways to try to address the problem: 1) using a highaccuracy IDCT (or an encoder-matched IDCT) in a decoder design, and 2) using encoder techniques to avoid such drift build-up. The primary problem is asserted to be the encoder’s behavior. Effective encoder techniques to avoid the problem are described, including a simple “generalized Morris drift test”, which is suggested as being superior to the test currently described in the MPEG-2 video specification. Experiment results are reported to show that performing this test in an encoder will completely solve the problem. Other encoding techniques to address the problem are also discussed.