On the improvement of motion compensation in wavelet transform video coding

This paper introduces a novel scheme of motion estimation (ME) and motion compensation (MC) in wavelet transform (WT) video coding. The scheme is unique in that half-pixel resolution ME and MC are applied on filtered coefficients ahead of decimation to preserve motion consistency and yet achieve minimal prediction residue. An efficient motion-compensated WT video coding system is built based on the proposed ME and MC. In the coding scheme, according to the property of embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW) coding, the mean square error (MSE) criterion is used in ME instead of normally adopted sum of absolute difference (SAD), and an overlapped MC algorithm is developed to combat the block effect introduced by block-based ME and improve peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) performance. The superior performance of the proposed scheme is demonstrated with experimental results.