Motion-compensated wavelet transform coding for color video compression

A variable-block-size multiresolution motion compensation (MRMC) scheme in which the size of a block is adapted to its level in the wavelet pyramid is proposed. This scheme not only considerably reduces the searching and matching time but also provides a meaningful characterization of the intrinsic motion structure. The variable-block-size approach also avoids the drawback of the constant-size MRMC in describing small object motion activities. After wavelet decomposition, each scaled subframe tends to have different statistical properties. An adaptive truncation process is implemented, and a bit allocation scheme similar to that in transform coding is examined. Four variations of the proposed motion-compensated wavelet video compression system are identified, and it is shown that the coding approach has a superior performance in terms of the peak-to-peak signal-to-noise ratio as well as the subjective quality. >