Complexity scalability in motion-compensated wavelet-based video coding

Scalable wavelet-based video codecs based on motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) require complexity scalability to cope with the growing heterogeneity of devices on which video has to be processed. The computational and memory complexity of two spatial-domain (SD) MCTF and in-band (IB) MCTF video codec instantiations are examined in this paper. Comparisons in terms of complexity versus performance are presented for both types of codecs. Some of the trade-offs between complexity and coding performance are analyzed and it is indicated how complexity scalability can be achieved in such video-codecs. Furthermore, a new approach is presented to obtain complexity scalability in IBMCTF video coding, by targeting the complexity of the complete-to-overcomplete discrete wavelet transform at the cost of a limited and controllable penalty on the overall coding performance.