The transmission, storage, and related processing of video are important technical problems in today's society. Progress related to the efficient representation of video is of increasing importance for personal mobile electronics and for Internet applications. Video coding algorithms are often based on motion-compensated predictive coding. The project involves an original approach for video representation that is based on recent developments in wavelet theory: recently developed transforms are designed to overcome basic problems that degrade the performance of the wavelet transform when it is applied to multidimensional data using the standard separable implementation.
The standard separable 3-D wavelet transform is rarely used for video compression because it mixes 3-D orientations in its subbands; this artifact reduces the effectiveness of the separable transform for providing an efficient representation of video. However, the new 3-D wavelet transform is free of the mixing artifact and gives a meaningful multi-scale decomposition for video. With the new transform, it is more likely that the multiresolution frame work, which has proved very effective for image compression and efficient feature extraction, can also be effectively applied to video representation. The new transform isolates motion in different directions in separate subbands, so the direction of motion can be inferred to some degree from the wavelet coefficients.
