Screen Content Coding in HEVC and Beyond

[Abstract] Screen content is video or picture captured from a computer screen typically by reading frame buffers or recording digital display output signals of a computer graphics device. Screen content is an extremely comprehensive and diverse class of content and includes traditional photosensor captured pictures as a small subset. Furthermore, screen content has many unique characteristics not seen in traditional content. By exploring these unique characteristics, new coding techniques can significantly improve coding performance of screen content. Today, more than ever, screen content coding (SCC) is becoming increasingly important due to the rapid growth of a variety of networked computers, clients, and devices based applications such as cloud computing and Wi⁃Fi display. SCC is the ultimate and most efficient way to solve the data transferring bottleneck problem in these applications. The solution is to transfer screen pixel data between these computers, clients, and devices. This paper provides an overview of the background, application areas, requirements, technical features, performance, and standardization work of SCC.

[Keywords] HEVC; AVS; Screen Content Coding; String Matching; Video Coding