A Drift-Reduced Hierarchical Wavelet Coding Scheme for Scalable Video Transmissions

Scalable video coding allows for the capability of (partially) decoding a video bitstream when faced with communication deficiencies such as low bandwidth or loss of data resulting in lower video quality. As the encoding is usually based on perfectly reconstructed frames, such deficiencies result in differently decoded frames at the decoder than the ones used in the encoder and, therefore, leading to errors being accumulated in the decoder. This is commonly referred to as the drift error. Drift-free scalable video coding methods also suffer from the low performance problem as they do not combine the residue encoding scheme of the current standards such as MPEG-4 and H.264 with scalability characteristics. We propose a scalable video coding method which is based on the motion compensation and residue encoding methods found in current video standards combined with the scalability property of discrete wavelet transform. Our proposed method aims to reduce the drift error while preserving the compression efficiency. Our results show that the drift error has been greatly reduced when a hierarchical structure for frame encoding is introduced.