3-D wavelet video coding with rate-distortion optimizization [optimizization read optimization]

The paper presents a rate-distortion (R-D) optimized 3D wavelet video coder by extending the concept of space-frequency quantization (SFQ) (Z. Xiong et al., 1997) from 2D to 3D. A lifting-based 3D (1T+2D) wavelet transform is deployed to process one part of the sequence at a time continuously, thus eliminating the boundary effects over GOPs. After 3D SFQ, in which an R-D based spatial-temporal tree-pruning process is used in conjunction with uniform quantization of wavelet coefficients, we apply an efficient progressive 3D entropy coder to further compress the quantized coefficients. Even without motion estimation, the new 3D SFQ video coder outperforms MPEG-4 and other 3D wavelet-based video coders for most sequences at the same bit rate.