We propose a novel motion estimation compensation (ME MC) method for wavelet-based (in-band) motion compensated temporal filtering (MCTF), with application to low-bitrate video coding. Unlike the conventional in-band MCTF algorithms, which require redundancy to overcome the shift-variance problem of critically sampled (complete) discrete wavelet transforms (DWT), we perform ME MC steps directly on DWT coefficients by avoiding the need of shift-invariance. We omit upsampling, the inverse-DWT (IDWT), and the calculation of redundant DWT coefficients, while achieving arbitrary subpixel accuracy without interpolation, and high video quality even at very low-bitrates, by deriving the exact relationships between DWT subbands of input image sequences. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed method, confirming that our model for ME MC effectively improves video coding quality.
All MCTF methods summarized above perform motion estimation motion compensation either in the temporal domain before DWT, or in the wavelet domain with the help of redundancy (e.g. ODWT, DT-CW, etc.), due to the fact that complete DWT is shift-variant and motion estimation directly on DWT subbands is a challenging task. However, redundancy in these methods leads to high computational complexity @cite_8 . Inspired by the fact that shift variance keeps the perfect reconstruction and nonredundancy properties of wavelets and breaks the coupling between spatial subbands, and that wavelet codecs always operate on complete DWT subbands @cite_6 , we propose a novel in-band ME MC method, which avoids the need of shift invariance, and operates directly on the original DWT coefficients of the input sequences. Since Haar wavelets are widely utilized in MCTF methods due to the coding efficiency based on their short kernel filters @cite_6 , our method is built on Haar subbands. For accurate ME MC, we define the exact relationships between the DWT subbands of input video sequences, which allows us to avoid upsampling, inverse DWT, redundancy, and interpolation for subpixel accuracy.
@cite_6 @cite_8
2110772958 1987262412
A new transform is proposed that derives the overcomplete discrete wavelet transform (ODWT) subbands from the critically sampled DWT subbands (complete representation). This complete-to-overcomplete DWT (CODWT) has certain advantages in comparison to the conventional approach that performs the inverse DWT to reconstruct the input signal, followed by the a spl grave -trous or the lowband shift algorithm. Specifically, the computation of the input signal is not required. As a result, the minimum number of downsampling operations is performed and the use of upsampling is avoided. The proposed CODWT computes the ODWT subbands by using a set of prediction-filter matrices and filtering-and-downsampling operators applied to the DWT. This formulation demonstrates a clear separation between the single-rate and multirate components of the transform. This can be especially significant when the CODWT is used in resource-constrained environments, such as resolution-scalable image and video codecs. To illustrate the applicability of the proposed transform in these emerging applications, a new scheme for the transform-calculation is proposed, and existing coding techniques that benefit from its usage are surveyed. The analysis of the proposed CODWT in terms of arithmetic complexity and delay reveals significant gains as compared with the conventional approach. The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has several advantages of multiresolution analysis and subband decomposition, which has been successfully used in image processing. However, the shift-variant property is intrinsic due to the decimation process of the wavelet transform, and it makes the wavelet-domain motion estimation and compensation inefficient. To overcome the shift-variant property, a low-band-shift method is proposed and a motion estimation and compensation method in the wavelet-domain is presented. The proposed method has a superior performance to the conventional motion estimation methods in terms of the mean absolute difference (MAD) as well as the subjective quality. The proposed method can be a model method for the motion estimation in wavelet-domain just like the full-search block matching in the spatial domain.