In-band scalable video coding with integrated wavelet-based display driving

The increasing demand for multimedia over networks and the heterogeneous nature of today's networks and playback devices impose the stringent need for scalable video coding. In this context, in-band wavelet-based video-coding architectures offer full scalability in terms of quality, resolution, and frame-rate and provide compression performance competitive with that of state-of-the-art non-scalable technology. Despite these advances, video streaming over wireless networks to handheld terminals is lagging in popularity due to the high power consumption of the existing portable devices. As a possible approach to alleviate this problem, the integration of wavelet-based passive-matrix-display driving into the inverse discrete wavelet transform (IDWT) block of the in-band video decoding architecture was investigated. In a nutshell, the IDWT no longer needs to be performed by the decoder, being synthesized instead by the display itself. This integration reduces the number of calculations required to generate the driving waveforms for passive-matrix displays and inherently leads to reduced power consumption on portable terminals. Moreover, the wavelet transform and the considered video-codec architecture are both resolution-scalable. Hence, the resolution-scalability feature of the video codec, enabling resolution-scalable display driving, is another means to control the power consumption of the portable device.