H.264 based screen content coding with HSV quantization

Screen images are a combination of text, graphics and natural images. They extensively appear in such applications as desktop sharing, remote education, video conference, and so on. Ideal compression efficiency on screen contents is unaffordable by classic image or video coder. This paper proposes a new scheme based on H.264 and Hue-Saturation-Value (HSV) color quantization, which performs color quantification prior to regular H.264 encoding. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves more than 1-2 dB at most bit rate settings compared with the traditional compression algorithm.