Lifting-based invertible motion adaptive transform (LIMAT) framework for highly scalable video compression

We propose a new framework for highly scalable video compression, using a Lifting-based Invertible Motion Adaptive Transform (LIMAT). We use motion-compensated lifting steps to implement the temporal wavelet transform, which preserves invertibility, regardless of the motion model. By contrast, the invertibility requirement has restricted previous approaches to either block-based or global motion compensation. We show that the proposed framework effectively applies the temporal wavelet transform along a set of motion trajectories. An implementation demonstrates high coding gain from a finely embedded, scalable compressed bit-stream. Results also demonstrate the effectiveness of temporal wavelet kernels other than the simple Haar, and the benefits of complex motion modeling, using a deformable triangular mesh. These advances are either incompatible or difficult to achieve with previously proposed strategies for scalable video compression. Video sequences reconstructed at reduced frame-rates,from subsets of the compressed bit-stream, demonstrate the visually pleasing properties expected from low-pass filtering along the motion trajectories. The paper also describes a compact representation for the motion parameters, having motion overhead comparable to that of motion-compensated predictive coders. Our experimental results compare favorably to others reported in the literature, however, the principle objective of this paper is to motivate a new framework for highly scalable video compression.