Performance Comparison between DWT-based and DCT-based Encoders

The scalable extension to the H.264/AVC has been established as a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard, and JPEG2000 is a state of the act still image coding standard. SVC is based on the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and JPEG2000 is based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Despite the DWT has been successfully employed in still image coding, the latest video coding standard keeps on ultilising DCT and the relevant techniques as its coding tools. In this paper, we investigate SVC for intra frame coding and JPEG2000 for still image coding, on video sequences with different resolutions and features. We intend to gain deeper insight into the application scenarios of these two transform techniques. The experiments results demonstrate that at high bitrates, JPEG2000 outperforms SVC, and it is vice versa. We also note that the PSNR difference between SVC and JPEG2000 decreases with increasing the picture resolution.