The pseudo code for the picture header 900 is illustrated with darkened lines 911-917, which are added for the purpose of defining quantization groups for chroma QP offsets as well as encoding the table 890. Specifically, the parameter “additional_chroma_qp_offset” in line 911 informs the decoder that there will be additional chroma QP offset specifications for the picture 802, and the parameter “chroma_qp_offset_max_depth” in the line 913 defines the level (and hence the size or the hierarchical depth) for QGs in the picture 802. Lines 914-916 of the pseudo code then define a set of chroma QP offset values for each entry (891-895) of the table 890. As illustrated, each entry of the table is assigned a chroma QP offset value for a first component (“chroma_cmp0_qp_offset[k]”) and a chroma QP offset value for a second component (“chroma_cmp1_qp_offset[k]”).
Since the two chroma components for each entry of the chroma QP offset table are likely correlated, some embodiments use the chroma QP offset value of one chroma component to predict the chroma QP offset value of the other chroma component. In other words, for the k-th entry in the table, if chroma_cmp0_qp_offset[k] represents the offset value of the first chroma component and chroma_cmp1_qp_offset[k] represents the offset value of the second chroma component, then the chroma QP offset for the second chroma component of the k-th entry is computed as: chroma_cmp1_qp_offset[k]=chroma_cmp0_qp_offset[k]+delta_chroma_cmp1_qp_offset[k]??(7)