Absolute value coding for robust and scalable video coding

Absolute value coding is introduced as a method for significantly reducing temporal drift within a motion compensated predictive video codec in the presence of loss. Drift reduction both improves error resilience and enables scalability by omission of parts of the bit-stream. In conjunction with matching pursuits, the system can be used to provide a displaced frame difference codec using fixed length codewords, which further improves error resilience and facilitates simple bit-stream editing.