Embedded color coding for scalable 3D wavelet video compression

With the recent expansion of multimedia applications, video coding systems are expected to become highly scalable, that is to allow partial decoding of the compressed bit-stream. Encoding techniques based on subband/wavelet decompositions offer a natural hierarchical representation for still pictures and their high efficiency in progressively encoding images yields a scalable representation. The multiscale representation can be extended to video data, by a 3D (or 2D+t) wavelet analysis, which includes the temporal dimension within the decomposition. Progressive encoding of video data represented by a 3Dsub-band decomposition was recently proposed as an extension of image coding techniques exploiting hierarchical dependencies between wavelet coefficients. In most of the previous image and video coding techniques, the compression is performed independently for luminance and chrominance coordinates. In this paper we propose a new coding technique for the chrominance coefficients, which not only delivers a bit-stream with a higher degree of embedding, but also takes advantage of the dependencies between luminance and chrominance components to provide an effective compression.