A novel scalable video codec based on MPEG-4 visual texture coding

A novel wavelet-based scalable video codec is proposed and implemented. Due to the superb coding efficiency and also the scalability that MPEG-4 visual texture coding (VTC) possesses, it is adopted as the intra-coding kernel. In addition, combined with the simplest and most effective way for dealing with temporal redundancy, motion estimation/compensation techniques, inter-coding can be integrated into our codec easily and efficiently. We achieve multiple scalabilities, including spatial scalability, temporal scalability, rate scalability, SNR scalability, and their combinations; they can be adjusted dynamically at the time of operation. Moreover, in order to make the video codec able to synchronize as fast as possible with a user´s request to change resolution, a modified hierarchical motion estimation scheme is also presented. The resultant coding efficiency of the proposed codec is comparable to that of the non-scalable MPEG-1 and outperforms most of the existed wavelet-based scalable codecs, such as SAMCoW (Shem, K. and Delp, E.J., IEEE Trans. CSVT, vol.9, no.1, 1999) and the approach of D. Taubman and Z. Zakhor (IEEE Trans. IP, vol.3, p.572-88, 1994).