Perceptual video coder incorporating wavelet based Intra frame coder

This paper presents the design of a Human Visual System (HVS) based video coder. In this work, a wavelet based transform coding method is adopted for coding the Intra frames instead of the DCT based scheme. The major aim of developing such a coder is to highlight the role of perceptual models in improving the reconstructed video quality. The perceptual aspects are incorporated in two parts of the video coder. First, vision models are incorporated into the coding structure of both the luma and chroma components of each I frame when represented using the YCbCr space, which improves the reconstructed video quality to a large extend. Second, a perceptual metric called Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), is used as the cost function for fast motion estimation which improves the speed of processing and prediction. The performance of the proposed coder is compared with the standard video coder. The performance comparison of the proposed and the standard coders are done in terms PSNR and latest perceptual measures, such as SSIM and VSNR. Thus the proposed coder gives promising results and paves the way for new research directions.