MULTI-RESOLUTION BASED VIDEO IMAGE COMPRESSION

A CRITICAL ISSUE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL HIGH-DEFINITION TELEVISION (HDTV) IS THE RELIABLE TRANSMISSION OF HIGH-QUALITY VIDEO IMAGES WITH MINIMUM TRANSMISSION BANDWIDTH. THIS CREATES A NEED FOR EFFICIENT DATA COMPRESSION ALGORITHMS FOR DIGITIZED IMAGE SEQUENCES. VIDEO IMAGES TYPICALLY CONTAIN A LARGE AMOUNT OF SPATIAL ANDTEMPORAL REDUNDANCY; THUS VERY HIGH COMPRESSION RATIOS ARE FEASIBLE IN PRINCIPLE. HOWEVER, EXISTING VIDEO COMPRESSION TECHNIQUES, SUCH AS THE CCITT STANDARD, CANNOT CONSISTENTLY ACHIEVE HIGH COMPRESSION RATIOS BECAUSE THEY UTILIZE FIXED IMAGE PARTITIONS AND SIMPLE MOTION ESTIMATION ALGORITHMS. HIGHER PERFORMANCE WILL BE OBTAINED BY UTILIZING THE PROPOSED VIDEO COMPRESSION APPROACH BASED ON MULTIRESOLUTIONIMAGE REPRESENTATIONS AND ADAPTIVE MOTION ESTIMATION PROCEDURES. THE MULTIRESOLUTION APPROACH DECOMPOSES IMAGES INTO SEVERAL RESIDUAL IMAGES CONTAINING THE SCENE FINE STRUCTURE AT DIFFERENT SCALES. BY SEPARATELY ESTIMATING THEMOTION PARAMETERS OF THE SIGNIFICANT FEATURES AT EACH RESOLUTION, THE LARGER FEATURES IN THE SCENE WILL BE COMPRESSED FAR MORE EFFICIENTLY. THE PHASE-I STUDY WILL INVOLVE AN EXAMINATION OF TWO DIFFERENT MULTIRESOLUTION REPRESENTATIONS (THE LAPLACIAN PYRAMID AND THE WAVELET TRANSFORM), THE DEVELOPMENT OF MOTION ESTIMATION ALGORITHMS FOR THE RESIDUAL IMAGES, AND AN EVALUATION OF COMPRESSION PERFORMANCE ON SELECTED VIDEO IMAGERY. PHASE II WILL REFINEAND SELECT THE FINAL MULTIRESOLUTION VIDEO COMPRESSION ALGORITHM, AND INVESTIGATE ITS IMPLEMENTATION IN SPECIAL-PURPOSE VLSI HARDWARE.