Motion-compensated wavelet transform coder for very low bit-rate visual telephony

Abstract

Abstract This paper proposes a new motion-compensated wavelet transform video coder for very low bit-rate visual telephony. The proposed coder sequentially employs: (1) selective motion estimation on the wavelet transform domain, (2) motion-compensated prediction (MCP) of wavelet coefficients, and (3) selective entropy-constrained vector quantization (ECVQ) of the resultant MCP errors. The selective schemes in motion estimation and in quantization, which efficiently exploit the characteristic of image sequences in a visual telephony, considerably reduce the computational burden. The coder also employs a tree structure encoding to represent efficiently which blocks were encoded. In addition, in order to reduce the number of ECVQ codebooks and the image dependency of their performance, we introduce a preprocessing of signals which normalizes input vectors of ECVQ. Simulation results show that our video coder provides good PSNR (peak-to-peak signal-to-noise ratio) performance and efficient rate control.