Novel Video Coder Using Multiwavelets

Abstract

Information has become one of the most valuable assets in the modern era. Recent technology has introduced the paradigm of digital information and its associated benefits and drawbacks. A thousand pictures require a very large amount of storage. While the advancement of computer storage technology continues at a rapid pace a means of reducing the storage requirements of an image and video is still needed in most situations. Thus, the science of digital image and video compression has emerged. For example, one of the formats defined for High Definition Television (HDTV) (Ben Waggoner 2002) broadcasting is 1920 pixels horizontally by 1080 lines vertically, at 30 frames per second. If these numbers are multiplied together with 8 bits for each of the three primary colors, the total data rate required would be 1.5 GB/sec approximately. So compression is highly necessary. This storage capacity seems to be more impressive when it is realized that the intent is to deliver very high quality video to the end user with as few visible artifacts as possible. Current methods of video compression such as Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) standard (Peter Symes 2000, Keith Jack 1996) can provide good performance in terms of retaining video quality while reducing the storage requirements. But even the popular standards like MPEG have limitations. Research in new and better methods of image and video compression is ongoing, and recent results suggest that some newer techniques may provide much greater performance. This motivates to go for video compression. An extension of image compression algorithms based on multiwavelets and making them suitable for video (as video contains sequence of still pictures) is essential. This chapter gives a summary of the new multiwavelet decomposition algorithm along with quantization techniques and illustrates their potential for inclusion in new video compression applications and standards (Sudhakar et al., 2009, Sudhakar & Jayaraman 2007, Sudhakar & Jayaraman 2008). Video coding for telecommunication applications has evolved through the development of the ISO/IEC MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and ITU-T H.261, H.262 and H.263 video coding standards (and later enhancements of H.263 known as H.263+ and H.263++), (Iain E.G. Richardson 2002) and has diversified from ISDN and T1/E1 service to embrace PSTN, mobile wireless networks, and LAN/Internet network delivery.