3-band motion-compensated temporal structures for scalable video coding.

Abstract

Recent breakthroughs in motion-compensated temporal wavelet filtering have finally enabled implementation of highly efficient scalable and error-resilient video codecs. These new wavelet codecs provide numerous advantages over nonscalable conventional solutions techniques based on motion-compensated prediction, such as no recursive predictive loop, separation of noise and sampling artifacts from the content through use of longer temporal filters, removal of long range as well as short range temporal redundancies, etc. Moreover, these wavelet video coding schemes can provide flexible spatial, temporal, signal-to-noise ratio and complexity scalability with fine granularity over a large range of bit rates, while maintaining a very high coding efficiency. However, most motion-compensated wavelet video schemes are based on classical two-band decompositions that offer only dyadic factors of temporal scalability. In this paper, we propose a three-band temporal structure that extends the concept of motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) that was introduced in the classical lifting framework. These newly introduced structures provide higher temporal scalability flexibility, as well as improved compression performance compared with dyadic Haar MCTF.