Fully-scalable wavelet video coding using in-band motion compensated temporal filtering

This paper presents a novel fully-scalable wavelet video coding scheme that performs efficient open-loop motion compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) in the wavelet domain (in-band). Unlike the conventional spatial-domain MCTF (SDMCTF) schemes, which apply MCTF on the original image data and then encode the residual image using a critically-sampled wavelet transform, the framework presented here applies the in-band MCTF (IBMCTF) after the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is performed in the spatial dimensions. To overcome the inefficiency of motion estimation (ME) in the wavelet domain, a complete-to-overcomplete DWT (CODWT) is performed. The proposed framework provides improved quality (SNR) and temporal scalability as compared with existing in-band closed-loop temporal prediction schemes with ODWT and improved spatial scalability as compared to SDMCTF. We present a thorough comparison between SDMCTF and the proposed IBMCTF in terms of coding efficiency and scalability. Furthermore, we describe several extensions that enable the filtering of the various bands to be performed independently, based on the resolution, sequence content, complexity requirements and desired scalability.