A Coding Scheme for Surveillance Video

In many surveillance applications, video data often need to be stored or transmitted and thus video coding is demanded. Generally speaking, surveillant regions of decoded video should be exhibited with higher fidelity by region segmentation, tracking and content-based coding. However, this is not necessary in some cases where both cameras and surveillant regions in frames are fixed. In this paper, a coding scheme for this special type of surveillance video is incorporated with SPIHT (set partitioning in hierarchical trees) algorithm for wavelet-based video coding. By scaling up the wavelet coefficients pertaining to the surveillant region, the region is coded with higher quality than the rest of the frame if the bit rate is limited. Experiments show the proposed scheme avoids the complexity of the conventional scheme for surveillance video coding without compromising the reconstructed video quality.