Multiresolution motion estimation and compensation for video coding

Recently, the quantity of data has known a big evolution especially with the emergence of many video applications over networks such as the videophone and the videoconferencing, and multimedia devices such as the high-definition TV and the personal digital assistants. So, it was crucial to reduce the quantity of data stored or transmitted by compressing it spatially and temporally. Hence, motion estimation and compensation are employed in video coding systems to remove temporal redundancy while keeping a high visual quality. They are the most important parts of the video coding process since they require the most computational power and the biggest consumption in resources and bandwidth. Therefore, many techniques have been developed to estimate motion between successive frames. In this paper, we will present our motion estimation and compensation method applied on the discrete wavelet transform coefficients and based on the block matching algorithm which is the simplest, the most efficient and the most popular technique. Additional techniques are introduced to accelerate the estimation process and improve the prediction quality.