Transform block coding

Transform block coding is performed very efficiently in terms of computational complexity and compression ratio, by coding the magnitude bits of the transform coefficients distributed in a matrix, in which the magnitude bits of the spectral coefficients are arranged column-wise with the spectral coefficients of the transform block ordered along a row direction of the matrix. That is, magnitude bits within a certain column of the matrix belong to a certain spectral coefficient, while magnitude bits within a certain row of the matrix belong to a certain bit plane. In this configuration, the distribution of non-zero magnitude bits may be condensed towards one corner of the matrix, corresponding to, for instance, the least significant bit plane and corresponding to, by using a scan order among the transform coefficients which sorts the transform coefficients generally in a manner from lowest to highest frequency, the lowest frequency. Various low complexity variants are presented.