3-D spatiotemporal subband decompositions for hierarchical compatible video coding by mathematical morphology

An efficient hierarchical 3-D spatiotemporal subband decomposition scheme using mathematical morphology is proposed in this paper~ It can support a hierarchy of video standards including both progressively scanned and interlaced signals. The compatibility among different video and distribution standards is increasingly important because of a multitude of video and multimedia services within broadband communication networks. This hierarchical coding scheme also can provide compatibility by splitting the source signal into several hierarchical layers available for different consumer receiver sets. Recently., a sophisticated spatiotemporai linear filtering bank is proposed for this 3-D subband decomposition. However, morphological filtering can be used here to reduce its complexity greatly for its simplicity and efficiency in parallel/pipeline hardware implementation. Some experiments, using a 2-D frequency sweep as a test pattern, are given to show the effectiveness of this approach.