COMPRESSION OF 10-BIT VIDEO USING THE TOOLS OF MPEG-2

We address the problem of compressing 10-bits per pixel video using the tools of the emerging MPEG-2 standard, which is primarily targeted to 8-bits per pixel video. We show that an amplitude scalable compression scheme for 10-bit video can be developed using the MPEG-2 syntax and tools. We experimentally evaluate the performance of the scalable approach and compare it with the straightforward non-scalable approach where the 10-bit input is rounded to 8 bits and usual 8-bit MPEG-2 compression is applied. In addition to general performance evaluation of scalable and non-scalable approaches, we also evaluate their multi-generation characteristics where the input video undergoes successive compression-decompression cycles. We show that it is possible to quantitatively analyze the multi-generation characteristics of the non-scalable approach using the theory of generalized projections.