In-band Motion Estimation and Compensation for Spatially Scalable Predictive Wavelet Video Coding

A wavelet-based spatially scalable video coding scheme with in-band prediction is investigated. The wavelet decomposition of the video frames is followed by the computation of a blockwise motion compensated prediction for the individual subbands. The shift-invariant overcomplete wavelet transform is exploited to obtain half-pixel motion vector accuracy without the need of interpolation. JPEG 2000 quantization and arithmetic coding are applied to the resulting prediction error. Motion estimation is performed in the wavelet transform domain between the subbands of successive video frames, using the overcomplete wavelet transform for the reference subbands. A blockwise decision between inter and intra coding is inserted to improve the coding performance. Motion vector costs are taken into account to favor an intra mode selection.