Adaptive subband VQ for very low bit rate video coding

A novel adaptive VQ based subband coding scheme for very low bit rate coding of video sequences is presented. Overlapped block motion estimation/compensation is employed to exploit interframe redundancy. A 2D wavelet transform (WT) is applied to the resulting displaced frame difference (DFD) signal. The WT coefficients are encoded using an adaptive vector quantization scheme in combination with a dynamic bit allocation strategy based on marginal analysis. Simulation results on videophone-type test sequences are given to evaluate the performance of the codec at very low bit rates. A comparative performance with the H.261 and H.263 video coding standards is also shown.