A Real-Time Video Encoding Scheme Based on the Contourlet Transform

Real-time video communication over the internet and other heterogeneous IP networks has become a significant part of modern communications, underlining the need for highly effi‐ cient video coding algorithms. The most desirable characteristic of such an algorithm would be the ability to maintain satisfactory visual quality while achieving good compression. Ad‐ ditional advantageous characteristics would be low computational complexity and real-time performance, allowing the algorithm to be used in a wide variety of less powerful comput‐ ers. Transmission of video over the network would benefit by the ability to adapt to the net‐ work's end-to-end bandwidth and transmitter/receiver resources, as well as by resistance to packet losses that might occur. Additionally, scalability and resistance to noise would be highly advantageous characteristics for a modern video compression algorithm. Most state of the art video compression techniques like the H.264, DivX/Xvid, MPEG2 fail to achieve real time performance without the use of dedicated hardware due to their high computa‐ tional complexity. Moreover, in order to achieve optimal compression and quality they de‐ pend on multipass statistical and structural analysis of the whole video content, which cannot happen in cases of live video stream generation as in the case of video-conferencing.