Implementation and analysis of directional discrete cosine transform in H.264 for baseline profile

Nearly all block-based transform schemes for image and video coding developed so far choose the 2-D discrete cosine transform (DCT) [2] of a square block shape. With almost no exception, this conventional DCT is implemented separately through two 1-D transforms [2], one along the vertical direction and another along the horizontal direction. Developing a new block based DCT framework is one in which the first transform may choose to follow a direction other than the vertical or horizontal one (directional one) and the second transform chooses the horizontal one. The coefficients produced by all the directional transforms in the first step are arranged appropriately so that the second transform can be applied to the coefficients that are best aligned with one another. Compared with the conventional DCT, the resulting directional DCT [4] framework is able to provide a better coding performance for image blocks that contain directional edges---a popular scenario in many image signals. By choosing the best from all directional DCTs (including the conventional DCT as a special case) for each image block, the rate distortion coding performance can be improved remarkably.