Image/video spatial scalability in compressed domain

Image/video compression is widely used in various applications with the advent of the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG), Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG), and H.261 standards. Hence, most visual data are stored in the compressed format. Spatial scalable encoding of visual data has several applications, including browsing visual databases, querying multimedia databases, interactive multimedia communications, etc. We propose two novel techniques, namely, format compatible (FC) discrete cosine transform (DCT) and format modified (FM) DCT to implement image/video spatial scalability directly in the DCT compressed domain. The FC-DCT technique can be used to manipulate the standard bit streams, such as JPEG, MPEG, etc., while the FM-DCT technique can be employed in a variety of applications which require fast processing. In contrast to the traditional spatial-domain techniques, the compressed-domain techniques remove the unnecessary decompression and recompression procedures, thus, they have the advantages of reduced computational complexity and storage requirements. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DCT-domain techniques can achieve a comparable performance at a much lower computational complexity compared to the spatial-domain techniques.