A smoothly scalable and fully JPEG2000-compatible video coder

In this paper, we analyze the scalability properties of the JPEG2000-compatible video encoder presented in M. Cagnazzo et al., (2004), and we improve its performances by presenting a new technique for an efficient motion vectors (MVs) encoding, producing a motion bitstream also compatible with JPEG2000. Our study shows that, thanks to our encoding strategy and to our peculiar temporal filters, scalably encoded sequences have the same or almost the same quality than non-scalably encoded ones: this is what we call smooth scalability. We also compared our encoder performances with the recent H.264 standard, showing comparable or sometimes better performances.