A rate-distortion optimized 3-D wavelet video coder

This paper presents a rate-distortion (R-D) optimized 3-D wavelet video coder by extending the concept of space-frequency quantization (SFQ) [1] from 2-D to 3-D. A lifting-based 3-D (1T+2D) wavelet transform is deployed to process one part of the sequence at a time continuously, thus eliminating the boundary effects over GOPs. After 3-D SFQ, in which an R-D based spatial-temporal tree-pruning process is used in conjunction with uniform quantization of wavelet coefficients, we apply an efficient progressive 3-D entropy coder to further compress the quantized coefficients. Even without motion estimation, the new 3-D SFQ video coder outperforms MPEG-4 and other 3-D wavelet-based video coders for most sequences at the same bit rate.