A uniform transform domain video codec based on dual tree complex wavelet transform

This paper describes a uniform transform domain video codec where the motion estimation/compensation (ME) is performed in the transform domain. The estimation technique discussed here is a subpixel transform domain ME based on the dual tree complex wavelet transform (DT CWT) and a maximum phase correlation technique. The DT CWT is a multiresolution fine-to-coarse bandpass filtered decomposition of each still frame and has desirable properties of shiftability, directional selectivity and perfect reconstruction (PR). Estimation is first performed at the finest resolution and successively proceeds to the coarse resolutions using a fine-to-coarse strategy. This gives multiresolution motion estimates enabling estimation of current frame transform coefficients from the corresponding ones in the previous frame. The key difference of this approach is the transform domain error frames-a uniform transform domain video codec. This further simplifies the encoder and decoder resulting in computational savings with comparable performance to the standards.