Complexity scalability in video coding based on in-band motion-compensated temporal filtering

Scalable wavelet-based video coding is of paramount importance in applications in order to adapt the video content to the channel conditions and to enable the selection of a variety of user preferences in terms of quality, resolution and frame-rate. Apart of this, a growing number of mobile devices on which video has to be decoded, stresses the need for complexity scalability to cope with their limited computational capabilities. In this context, the paper focuses on wavelet-based scalable video coding based on in-band motion-compensated temporal filtering and addresses the problem of achieving complexity scalability in the complete-to-overcomplete discrete wavelet transform (CODWT) module employed by such architectures. The proposed methods demonstrate that this can be achieved at the cost of a limited and controllable penalty in the overall coding performance.