Improved color coding for scalable 3D wavelet video compression

With the recent expansion of multimedia applications, video coding systems are expected to become highly scalable, that is to allow partial decoding of the compressed bit-stream, in order to adapt to heterogeneous networks and users capabilities. Encoding techniques based on subband/wavelet decompositions offer a natural hierarchical representation for still pictures and their high efficiency in progressively encoding images yields a scalable representation. Progressive encoding of video data represented by a 3D-subband decomposition was recently proposed as an extension of image coding techniques exploiting hierarchical dependencies between wavelet coefficients. In this paper we propose a new coding technique for the chrominance coefficients, which not only delivers a bit-stream with a higher degree of embedding, but also takes advantage of the dependencies between luminance and chrominance components to provide a more effective compression.