Enhancing coding efficiency in spatial scalable multiview video coding with wavelets

Scalable multiview video coding might become important in future immersive telecommunication scenarios. Therefore, we present a fully scalable multiview video coding framework that is based on wavelets. It offers scalable decoding of the bitstream in the time, view, spatial, and quality dimensions. Whereas its performance is already comparable to state-of-the-art multiview video coding at the full spatial resolution, the quality of the downscaled spatial resolution is not satisfying. After reviewing the reasons for this, we propose an extended coding scheme where a spatial wavelet transform is performed first and the high spatial resolution layers of the multiview video sequence are predicted from the lower ones in the wavelet domain. The structure and performance of this in-band prediction are analyzed and several enhancements are proposed. Finally, it can be shown that efficient spatial scalability can be achieved in this framework with only minor performance loss at the full resolution.