Abstract
In this paper, we propose a hybrid wavelet-based video codec for low bit-rate, memory-constrained, and scalable video applications. The hybrid video codec consists of two main modules, the 3-D (temporal and 2-D spatial) lifting-based integer wavelet transform module that performs an energy compaction of a group of video frames and the modified 3-D listless zero-tree coding module that further codes the transformed video frames. When executing the modified 3-D listless zero-tree coding module, the 3-D asymmetric parent-child relations are used for sorting the 3-D wavelet coefficients more effectively. Advantageous features of the hybrid video codec include low computational complexity, memory-efficient, rate, spatial, and temporal scalability. To evaluate the proposed video codec, we have compared it with the 3-D LZC video codec proposed by Lin and Burgess. Extensive simulations have been conducted. The simulation results show that a significant gain in PNSR is obtained with this video codec compared to the 3-D LZC video codec.