Scalable lossy to lossless video coding via adaptive 3D wavelet transform and context modeling

We investigated scalable compression of image sequences using 3D wavelet transform and adaptive arithmetic coding driven by 3D context modeling. The interplays between motion compensation, 3D wavelet transform, and entropy coding were studied empirically. The best compression, in both lossy and lossless cases, was achieved by a non-dyadic 3D wavelet decomposition and high-order Markov modeling of transform coefficients, but without motion compensation. The experimental results are very encouraging. On the mother-and-daughter and salesman QCIF sequences, the proposed method outperforms H.263 by up to 3dB. If integer wavelets are used, our method also improves the lossless performance of other 3D integer wavelet methods by an appreciable margin.