Scalable high-definition video coding

Multiresolution, or scalable, video coding has emerged to be of great interest in the compression community. It has been recognized that many applications, such as, image database browsing, desktop computing, terrestrial broadcasting, and others, can benefit from multiresolution viewing of embedded data sets. In this paper we present a new three-dimensional subband coder which provides six different spatio-temporal resolutions of a video signal. Motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) is used for temporal analysis. The encoding algorithm efficiently compresses the data from the six resolutions into a single bit-stream while removing data which is redundant across different resolutions. Our algorithm successfully merges spatial and temporal scalability without imposing restrictions on which of the six video resolutions can be decoded, while allowing optimal encoding of the video at each spatial and temporal resolution.