A 3-D Virtual SPIHT for Scalable Very Low Bit-Rate Embedded Video Compression

In this paper we propose a modification of the 3-D Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (3-D SPIHT) algorithm for very low bit-rate wavelet-based video coding. The modified algorithm, called 3-D Virtual SPIHT (3-D VSPIHT), virtually decomposes the coarsest level of the wavelet coefficients to reduce the number of three-dimensional (spatio-temporal) sets in the 3-D SPIHT algorithm. Our simulation results show that the proposed codec has better performance than the original 3-D SPIHT algorithm, especially for very low bit-rate video coding. The low complexity of the codec and the embeddedness property of the output bitstream make it a convenient coding technique for applications such as Internet video streaming via low bit rate channel. Moreover it has a good potential to carry spatial and temporal scalability, which are especially important for the new multimedia applications.