Subband motion compensation for spatially scalable video coding

In this paper, a new enhancement layer motion compensation technique referred to as subband motion compensation is proposed for spatially scalable video coding. This approach is proposed as an alternative to a technique which we call pyramid motion compensation in this paper and which is referred to as inter-layer residual prediction in the H.264/MPEG4-AVC scalable extension, Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard. The main difference between these two techniques lies in the way they use the base layer information to encode the enhancement layer. Experimental results comparing the two approaches show that for enhancement layer encoding, pyramid method is better when the corresponding base layer is encoded with a lower bitrate while subband method outperforms pyramid method when the base layer has a higher bitrate. This motivates future proposed work to adaptively choose between these two methods at the macroblock level or even at the transform coefficient level for spatially scalable video coding.