Adaptive Embedded Zero Tree for Scalable Video Coding

Abstract

Video streaming over the Internet has gained popularity during recent years mainly due to the revival of video-conferencing and video-telephony applications and the proliferation of (video) content providers. However, the heterogeneous, dynamic, and best-effort nature of the Internet cannot always guarantee a certain bandwidth for an application utilizing the Internet. Scalability has been introduced to deal with such issues (up to a certain point) by adapting the video quality with the available bandwidth. In addition, wavelet based scalability combined with representation methods such as embedded zero trees (EZWs) provides the possibility of reconstructing the video even when only the initial part of the streams have been received. EZW prioritizes the wavelet coefficients based on their energy content. Our experiments however, indicate that giving more priority to low frequency content improves the video quality at a specific bit rate. In this paper, we propose a method to improve on the compression rate of the EZW by prioritizing the coefficients by combining each frequency sub-band with its energy content. Initial experimental show that the first two layers of the generated EZW are about 22.6% more concise.