Wavelet based scalable video coding: A comparative study

Scalable video coding provides a competent means to transmit a video at different resolutions. The basic idea is passing of compressed data in terms of layers, which consists of a single base layer, and one or many enhancement layers. By decoding the base layer, lower resolution/quality video is produced, and by decoding the enhancement layers higher quality video is produced. Scalability is obtaining a video, at varying resolution/quality, by encoding or decoding a video sequence. To achieve spatial and temporal decomposition of the input video sequence, wavelet transform combined with motion compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) is carried out in this paper. To remove redundancy, the motion vectors and wavelet coefficients are compressed followed by a bit stream representation giving rise to a layered representation. A base layer with two enhancement layers is taken which is verified for four different wavelet based compression methods, namely SPIHT-3D, SPIHT, STW and EZW. SPIHT-3D is considered to be the best among these.