Biorthogonal wavelets for intra-frame video coding

The choice of filter bank in wavelet video compression is a crucial issue that effects both video quality and compression ratio. A series of biorthogonal, symmetric wavelet filters of differing length were evaluated by compressing and decompressing a number of standard video test sequences, using three sets of quantisation parameters. A video codec quality analyser (CQA) is used to assess the subjective quality of the coded stream with respect to the uncoded one. Experiments show that the familiar FBI wavelet offers the best compromise between high quality reconstruction and low bit rate, with the Mean wavelet being a suitable alternative for very low bit rate applications.