High-Performance 3-D Embedded Wavelet Video (EWV) Coding

This paper presents a rate-distortion (R-D) optimized 3-D embedded wavelet video (EWV) coder by extending the concept of EBCOT [1] from 2-D to 3-D. After a lifting based 3-D wavelet transform, different subbands are coded independently using bit plane coding with different context models to provide flexible scalability in both spatial and temporal domain. A global R-D optimization procedure is used to generate an embedded bitstream for a target bit rate. Experiments show that, even without motion estimation, the EWV coder outperforms both MPEG-4and 3-D ESCOT [2] for most low motion video sequences.