A real-time simulcast multi-view wavelet video coding based on skipping of spatial subbands

In this paper a real-time simulcast multi-view video coding based on three-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (3D DWT) is considered. An efficient rate-distortion criterion of skipping spatial subbands is proposed. A processing of subbands is done in a group of frames from low frequency to high-frequency temporal subbands and from low frequency to high-frequency spatial subbands. If for the processed subband in the current view it appears to be more efficient not to include the highest significant bit-plane into the output bit stream, then all the corresponding temporal and spatial child subbands are skipped without any calculations of 2-D wavelet transforms and entropy encoding. Moreover, all corresponding spatial subbands in sequel views (with its child subbands) are skipped as well. Simulations results have demonstrated that the 3-D DWT codec with the proposed skipping rule has much lower computational complexity (from 2 up to 8 times) for the same quality level compared to the H.264/AVC standard in the low complexity mode.