Adaptive scanning based on a morphological representation of coefficients for H.264/AVC

In this letter, an effective scanning method based on a morphological representation of quantized coefficients is proposed for intra coding in H.264. In the proposed scanning method, the scan order for each block is adaptively reconfigured by exploiting a residual correlation beyond the border of the block. An initial scan order for the current block is determined first by using the pattern of nonzero coefficients in the adjacent block. Then, a complete scan order is obtained by performing the dilation operation at each position within the initial scan order. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the coding efficiency up to 3.7% compared to the conventional zigzag scanning method.