Puzzle temporal lifting for wavelet-based video coding

Motion-compensated lifting schemes have become a reference for the temporal filtering of video data. However, block-based motion estimation and compensation produce annoying blocking artifacts. In this paper, we propose a new lifted temporal filtering method, based on joint segmentation and motion estimation in macroblocks. This method consists in assigning locally the motion information locally to regions instead of blocks, hence the name "puzzle temporal lifting". We first present the puzzle filtering algorithm and we state the conditions of its invertibility. Then, we propose a method to extract regions of occlusion from the motion and segmentation information. The resulting regions are finally exploited within the proposed puzzle filtering with occlusion management. Preliminary experimental results show that the blocking artifacts can be removed, which results in an improvement of visual quality.