Evaluation of Temporally Scalable Video Coding Techniques

Two temporally scalable video coding techniques, temporal subband coding (TSB) and predictive coding, are evaluated both theoretically and in practice to provide comparisons of compression and visual quality at differing frame rates. Results demonstrate that TSB coding has a higher coding gain at full frame rate than predictive coding if both algorithms use either no motion compensation or motion compensation (MC) that can be modeled as an invertible pre-distortion of the video sequence. However, predictive coding outperforms TSB coding at full frame rate when both schemes use block-based MC. In addition, visual results for lower-frame-rate video using TSB coding are unacceptable due to significant distortions from temporal filtering. These results are demonstrated through both theoretical evaluation of rate-distortion based coding gains and simulated coding of real video sequences.