Layer-correlated motion estimation and motion vector coding for the 3D-wavelet video coding

This paper proposes an efficient layer-correlated scheme to reduce the bit cost for motion vectors in the 3D wavelet coding. Previous works show that incorporating motion alignment into the lifting structure enables the 3D wavelet coding to provide a competitive performance to the state-of-the-art JVT standard. In general, the temporal wavelet decomposition consists of multiple layers, while each layer adopts one set of motion vectors to achieve high coding efficiency and temporal scalability. Since the current schemes code these MVs independently, this greatly increases the bit cost for coding MV. In order to reduce the motion cost, the proposed scheme performs motion estimation considering the MV correlation among layers. Several modes are proposed to describe the different local correlations at the macroblock level. By an R-D optimized mode selection engine, the proposed scheme can save up to 33% bits of MVs at the similar texture quality.