A two-layer MPEG2-compatible video coding technique using wavelets

In this paper, a two-layer hierarchical video coding technique that is compatible with MPEG2 is presented. By using a simplified version of the Mallat algorithm, a video signal is decomposed as two constituent signals, the smoothed signal comprising low-frequency content and the edge part representing the high-frequency information. The smoothed signal is then encoded into an MPEG2 video stream, while the edge information is encoded by utilizing the chain code into an MPEG2 private stream. By applying this coding strategy, the artifacts such as the blocking effect that is usually present in conventional block-based coding schemes, especially at low bit rate, and the ringing effect which may occur in a wavelets-based method, are both overcome. Simulation results show that the proposed coding scheme is capable of producing high-quality reconstructed video signals