Temporally scalable motion compensated adaptive temporal subband coding of video

It has been asserted that temporal subband coding (TSB) is inferior to predictive coding for regionally motion compensated (e.g. block-based MC) temporally scalable compressed video [1]. There are two major disadvantages of TSB coding: temporal filtering distortions, and 'open-loop' predictive coding of covered and uncovered regions. The 'open-loop' structure of TSB coding, however, affords two major advantages not enjoyed by MCP coding: simple optimal bit-allocation, non-existence of quantization error feedback. A new adaptive temporal subband (TSB) motion compensated predictive (MCP) coder is proposed. Hierarchical variable-sized block-matched regions with low predictive error are TSB coded, while poorly predicted regions are 'open-loop' MCP coded. Simulation results demonstrate that the adaptive coder substantially improves the temporal scalability of TSB coding, retains an advantageous 'open-loop' structure and provides comparable or superior PSNR to both MCP and TSB coding at MPEG-1 quality bitrates.