Video Coding Using a Complex Wavelet Transform and Set Partitioning

A video-coding system that exploits the motion-selective characteristics of the 3-D complex dual-tree discrete wavelet transform is presented. The proposed system does not perform explicit motion compensation but instead relies on the dual-tree transform to isolate moving features. Although the dual-tree transform is redundant, a noise-shaping process increases the sparsity of the transform coefficients, resulting in a high degree of spatiotemporally coherent regions of insignificant coefficients. The transform coefficients are coded with binary set-partitioning using k-d trees in an algorithm that exploits both within-subband spatiotemporal coherency as well as cross-subband correlation to achieve efficient coding. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms other coders that also do not perform explicit motion estimation or compensation.