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Barbell-Lifting Based 3-D Wavelet Coding Scheme

Barbell-Lifting Based 3-D Wavelet Coding Scheme
Barbell-Lifting Based 3-D Wavelet Coding Scheme

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 17, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2007
Barbell-Lifting Based 3-D Wavelet Coding Scheme
Ruiqin Xiong, Jizheng Xu, Member, IEEE, Feng Wu, Senior Member, IEEE, and Shipeng Li, Member, IEEE
(Invited Paper)
Abstract—This paper provides an overview of the Barbell lifting coding scheme that has been adopted as common software by the MPEG ad hoc group on further exploration of wavelet video coding. The core techniques used in this scheme, such as Barbell lifting, layered motion coding, 3-D entropy coding and base layer embedding, are discussed. The paper also analyzes and compares the proposed scheme with the oncoming Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard because the hierarchical temporal prediction technique used in SVC has a close relationship with motion compensated temporal lifting (MCTF) in wavelet coding. The commonalities and differences between these two schemes are exhibited for readers to better understand modern scalable video coding technologies. Several challenges that still exist in scalable video coding, e.g., performance of spatial scalable coding and accurate MC lifting, are also discussed. Two new techniques are presented in this paper although they are not yet integrated into the common software. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the performance of the Barbell-lifting coding scheme and compare it with SVC and another well-known 3-D wavelet coding scheme, MC embedded zero block coding (MC-EZBC). Index Terms—Barbell lifting, lifting-based wavelet transform, Scalable Video Coding (SVC), 3-D wavelet video coding.
I. INTRODUCTION
W
AVELET transform [1] provides a multiscale representation of image and video signals in the space-frequency domain. Aside from energy compaction and decorrelation properties that facilitate efcient compression of natural images, a major advantage of wavelet representation is its inherent scalability. It endows compressed video and image streams with exibility and scalability in adapting to heterogeneous and dynamic networks, diverse client devices, and the like. Furthermore, recent progresses in literature have shown that 3-D wavelet video coding schemes are able to compete in performance with the conventional hybrid motion compensated/discrete cosine transform MC/DCT-based standard approaches (e.g., H.264/AVC [2]). In 3-D wavelet video coding, wavelet transforms are applied temporally across frames, and horizontally and vertically within
Manuscript received October 6, 2006; revised June 15, 2007. This paper was recommended by Guest Editor T. Wiegand. R. Xiong was with Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing 100080, China. He is now with the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China (e-mail: rqxiong@https://www.sodocs.net/doc/5513688734.html,). J. Xu, F. Wu, and S. Li are with Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing 100080, China (e-mail: jzxu@https://www.sodocs.net/doc/5513688734.html,; fengwu@https://www.sodocs.net/doc/5513688734.html,; spli@microsoft. com). Color versions of one or more of the gures are available online at http:// https://www.sodocs.net/doc/5513688734.html,. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TCSVT.2007.905507
each frame, respectively. The correlations among frames are exploited by temporal wavelet transform operated on original frames instead of motion compensation from reconstructed previous frames. This paper focuses on the case in which temporal transform exists prior to 2-D spatial transform [3]–[23], case. Due to the object and/or camera monamely, the tion in a scene, the same point on a moving object can be located at different pixel positions in consecutive frames. To take full advantage of temporal correlation and, hence, achieve high coding efciency, the temporal transform should be performed along motion trajectories. Due to complications in combining wavelet transform and motion alignment, the efciency of temporal transform can become a bottleneck in high performance 3-D wavelet video coding schemes. Some global and local motion models are proposed for motion alignment in temporal wavelet transform. Taubman et al. [6] predistort video sequence before the temporal transform, by translating pictures relative to one another, while Wang et al. [7] use a mosaic technique to warp each video frame into a common coordinate system. Both schemes assume a global motion model, which may be inadequate for video sequences with local motion. To overcome this limitation, Ohm [8] proposes a block-matching technique that is similar to the one used in standard video coding schemes, while paying special attention to covered/uncovered and connected/unconnected regions. But it fails to achieve perfect reconstruction with motion alignment at subpixel accuracy. Other related works also adopt similar motion models but focus on different aspects, such as tri-zerotree [9], rate allocation [10], and SPIHT [11]. Since 2001, several groups have looked into combining motion alignment with the lifting-structure of wavelet transform [12]–[23]. These techniques are generally known as MC temporal ltering (MCTF). One noteworthy work is [12], in -pel) motion which the authors implement the rst subpixel ( alignment with perfect reconstruction in the motion-compensated lifting framework. They are also the rst to incorporate overlapped-block motion alignment into the lifting-based temporal transform. However, only the Haar lters are used in [12]. Luo et al. [13] (and its journal version [14]) rst employ -pel motion alignthe biorthogonal 5/3 wavelet lters with lters ment. Secker and Taubman use both the Haar and -pel motion alignment, see [15] and its journal (again with version [16]). Several follow-up works (e.g., [17] and [18]) lters for temporal also demonstrate the advantage of the transform. Other related publications with different focuses -pel motion alignment, or longer lters, (e.g., using adaptive or low-complexity implementation, scalable motion coding, etc.) appear in [19]–[23].
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Fig. 1. Block diagram of the Barbell-lifting coding scheme.
Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) has started studies on 3-D wavelet video coding from motion threading for exploiting the long-term correlation across frames along motion trajectories [24], [25]. The work [25] also proposes an efcient entropy coding, 3-D-embedded subband coding with optimized truncation (ESCOT) for 3-D wavelet coefcients. However, the motion threading technique still has limitations on handling many-to-one mapping and nonreferred pixels. To solve these problems, Luo et al. further develop the lifting-based motion threading technique in [13], [14], and [26]. Subsequently, additional effort has been invested in this area. Xiong et al. propose multiple modes with different block sizes (similar to that in H.264/AVC) for accurate motion alignment and overlapped block motion alignment to suppress the blocking boundaries in prediction frames [27]. Feng et al. propose the energy distributed update technique to eliminate mismatch between prediction and update steps in motion-aligned temporal lifting transform [28]. All these techniques are integrated into a general lifting framework called as Barbell lifting [29]. In addition, to maintain high performance of 3-D wavelet video coding in a broad range of bit rates, Xiong et al. also investigate layered motion vector estimation and coding [30]. Ji et al. propose an approach to incorporate a close-loop H.264/AVC into 3-D wavelet video coding to improve performance at low bit rates [31]. MPEG has been playing an important role in actively exploring and promoting scalable video coding technologies from advanced ne granularity scalable (FGS) coding to inter-frame wavelet coding. In 2003, a call for proposals (CfP) was released to collect scalable video coding technologies and evaluate their performances [32]. A total of 21 submissions were nally made which met all the deadlines listed in the CfP, including our Barbell-lifting coding scheme [33]. There are two test scenarios in the CfP. For scenario 1, the working bandwidth range is large and three levels of temporal/spatial scalabilities are required. Scenario 2 contains a comparatively narrow working bandwidth range and only has two levels of temporal/spatial scalabilities. The Barbell-lifting coding scheme ranks rst in scenario 1 and third in scenario 2 [34]. Finally, this scheme is adopted as common software by the MPEG ad hoc group on further exploration of wavelet video coding [35], and is, therefore, publicly available for all MPEG members.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II overviews the proposed Barbell-lifting coding scheme and core techniques used there. Section III discusses the commonalities and differences between the Barbell-lifting coding scheme and the SVC. In Section IV, two new techniques are proposed to handle ongoing challenges in scalable video coding and to further improve the coding performance. Section V provides the performance of our proposed Barbell-lifting coding scheme and compares the scheme with SVC and MC embedded zero block coding (MC-EZBC). We conclude the paper in Section VI. II. BARBELL-LIFTING CODING SCHEME The overall block diagram of the Barbell-lifting coding scheme is depicted in Fig. 1. First, to exploit the correlation among neighboring video frames, wavelet transform is performed on original frames temporally to decompose them into lowpass frames and highpass frames. To handle motion in video frames, motion compensation is incorporated with the Barbell lifting, which is a high-dimensional extension of the basic 1-D-lifting structure of wavelet transform [36]. Second, to further exploit the spatial correlation within the resulting temporal subband frames, 2-D wavelet transform is applied to decompose each frame into some spatial subbands. Third, coefcients in the ultimate spatio–temporal subbands are processed bit plane-by-bit plane to form an embedded compressed stream. The side information in Fig. 1, including motion vectors, macroblock modes and other auxiliary parameters to control decoding process, is also entropy coded. Finally, the streams of subband coefcients and side information are assembled to form the nal video stream packets. The stream generated by the above scheme is highly scalable. The bit plane coding technique for subband coefcients provides ne granularity scalability in reconstruction quality. The hierarchical lifting structure of temporal transform is ready to provide the scalability in frame rate. The multiresolution property of wavelet representation naturally provides the scalability in resolution. When the bit rate, frame rate, and spatial resolution of a target video are specied, a substream for reconstructing that video can be easily extracted by identifying relevant spatio–temporal subbands and retaining partial or complete stream of them while discarding the others.

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Fig. 2. Basic lifting step. (a) Conventional lifting. (b) Proposed Barbell lifting.
The following subsections will discuss the core techniques employed in our proposed coding scheme, such as Barbell lifting, layered motion coding, 3-D entropy coding and base layer embedding. At the same time, we also cite several related techniques used in other schemes so as to give audience a fuller picture. A. Barbell Lifting In many previous 3-D wavelet coding schemes, the concept of lifting-based 1-D wavelet transform is simply extended to temporal direction as a transform along motion trajectories. In this case, the temporal lifting is actually performed as if in 1-D signal space. This requests an invertible one-to-one pixel mapping between neighboring frames so as to guarantee that the prediction and update lifting steps operate on the same pixels. However, the motion trajectories within real-world video sequences are not always as regular as expected, and are sometimes even unavailable. For example, pixels with fractional-pixel motion vector are mapped to "virtual pixels" on reference, which cannot be directly updated. In the case of multiple pixels mapping to one pixel on reference, the related motion trajectories will merge. For covered and uncovered regions, motion trajectories will disappear and appear. The direct adoption of 1-D lifting in temporal transform cannot naturally handle these situations. It motivates us to develop a more general lifting scheme for 1-D wavelet transform in a high-dimensional signal space, where multiple predicting and updating signals are supported explicitly through Barbell functions. When the lifting scheme developed by Sweldens [36] is directly used in temporal direction, the basic lifting step can be illustrated in Fig. 2(a). A frame is replaced by superimposing two neighboring frames on it with a scalar factor specied by the lifting representation of the temporal wavelet lter. Noand respectively, tice that only one pixel, of the signals is involved in the lifting step. In the proposed Barbell lifting as shown in Fig. 2(b), instead of using a single pixel, we use a function of a set of nearby pixels as the input. The functions and are called as Barbell functions. They can be any linear or nonlinear functions that take any pixel values on the frame as variables. The Barbell function can also vary from pixel to pixel. Therefore, the basic Barbell lift step is formulated as (1) According to the denition of basic Barbell lifting step, we give a general formulation for -level MCTF, where the th MCTF consists of lifting steps. Assume that denotes input frames of the
th MCTF and denotes the result of the th lifting step of the th MCTF. indicates the frame index. For odd , the th lifting step modies odd-indexed frames based on the even-indexed frames, as formulated in (2). For even , the th lifting step modies even-indexed frames based on the odd-indexed frames, as formulated in (3). Here and are lter coefcients specied by the lifting representation of the th level temporal wavelet lter. and are the Barbell function operators to generate lifting signal in odd and even steps, respectively. After all the lifting steps, we get the lowpass frames and highpass frames, dened by and , respectively. Theoretically, arbitrary discrete wavelet lter can be adopted in MCTF easily based on (2) and (3). But the biorthogonal lter is the one which has already been veried practical with good coding performance so far. It consists of and two lifting steps: . In this case, and are commonly called as prediction and update steps, respectively. In multilevel MCTF, the lowpass frames of a MCTF level . Finally, are fed to the next MCTF level by temporal subbands: highpass the -level MCTF outputs subbands , and lowpass subband
(2)
(3) 1) MC Prediction: We discuss the Barbell function of MC prediction. Assume that there is a multiple-to-multiple mapping to frame , based on the motion befrom frame tween these frames and the correlation in related pixels. For any pixel , we dene as the set of pixels in that is mapped to. For each pair of pixels , weighting parameter is introduced for prediction, to indicate the correlation strength between pixel and . The operator based on Barbell lifting is dened as (4) Here and are coordinates of pixels and , in frames and , respectively. The weighting parameters are subject to the constraint
There are two types of parameters in the Barbell function: the mapping from to and the weighting param. The mapping can be derived from motion veceters tors estimated based on the block-based motion model. In general, motion vector is up to fractional pixel for accurate prediction, such as -pel and -pel in H.264/AVC. The Barbell

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lifting also supports fractional-pixel motion accuracy. In this case, each pixel in current frame is mapped to multiple pixels in neighboring reference frame while the weighting parameters are determined by the interpolation lter (the formulation is given in [29]). To achieve a proper tradeoff between the efciency of motion prediction and the coding cost of motion information, variable block-size partitioning is used for motion representation in the Barbell function. All the macroblock partitions in H.264/AVC, such as 16 16, 16 8, 8 16, 8 8 and subpartitions in an 8 8 block, are supported in Barbell lifting. In addition, ve motion coding modes are dened [27], including the Bid, FwD, BwD, DirInv, and Skip modes, to further reduce the cost of coding the mapping relationship. These modes jointly signal the connectivity in two directions and the motion vector assigned with a macroblock. In the FwD and BwD modes, the coding for motion in one side is skipped. Furthermore, the Skip and DirInv modes exploit the spatial and temporal correlation in motion elds, respectively, and, therefore, save coding bits. Although the smaller block-size allowed in variable block-size partition in motion alignment can signicantly reduce average energy of predicted errors, it also increases the number of blocks used in motion compensation and causes more blocking boundaries in prediction frame. This leads to many high-amplitude coefcients in spatial highpass subbands of residue frame after spatial subband decomposition. The overlapped-block motion compensation (OBMC) technique is adopted in Barbell lifting [27] to smooth the transition at block are determined boundaries. In this case, the parameters by both interpolation lter and weighting window of OBMC (the formulation is given in [29]). Beside the OBMC technique, it is also possible to support any other multihypothesis techniques, e.g., the multiple-reference MC prediction, by the proposed Barbell-lifting model. These techniques can improve the compression efciency of 3-D wavelet video coding. In the prediction step of our proposed coding scheme, we mainly borrow some mature MC prediction techniques from conventional video coding schemes and incorporate them into the Barbell-lifting framework. There are also several other techniques developed in other wavelet coding schemes for MC prediction step. A typical one is hierarchical variable size block matching (HVSBM) [10], [17], which consists of constructing an initial full motion vector tree and pruning it subject to a given bit rate. 2) Motion Compensated Update: The update step in Barbell lifting is performed according to the idea proposed in [28]. For a where and pair of pixel , since the pixel is predicted from pixel with a weighting in the prediction step, we propose to use the parameter prediction error on the pixel to update the pixel , with the same weighting parameter. For any pixel , we further dene
Generally, the update step has an effect of temporal smoothing for regions with accurate motion alignment, and thus can improve the coding performance. But when the motion in video sequence is too complicated to be accurately represented by the employed motion model, temporal highpass frames may contain large prediction residues. This makes the coding of temporal lowpass frames difcult when the prediction residue is superimposed on the even frames. Also, it results in ghost-like artifacts in the temporal lowpass frames, which is not desired for temporal scalability. To solve the problem, a is applied to the updating signal threshold function
(6) where if if if (7)
– , most visually-noticeable artiBy empirically setting facts can be removed from lowpass frames but the advantage of update step in coding performance is still maintained. Besides the simple but effective threshold approach used in the Barbell-lifting coding scheme, [37], [38] also introduced some techniques to adjust the update signal and, hence, reduce ghosting effects. Reference [39] proposes to regularize the updating signal based on human visual system (HVS). In another more interesting work [40], Girod et al. investigate the update step as an optimal problem and derive a closed-form expression of the update step for a given linear prediction step. Reference [41] further reveals the relationship between the energy distributed update [28] and the optimum update [40], and proposes a set of new update coefcients in improving coding efciency and reducing quality uctuations. B. Layered Motion Coding A stream generated by the Barbell-lifting coding scheme can be decoded at different bit rates, frame rates and resolutions. In terms of rate-distortion (R-D) optimization, a xed set of motion vectors is not an optimum solution for different reconstructions. To achieve an optimum tradeoff between motion and texture data, the Barbell-lifting coding scheme at least requests a layered motion coding. to denote the distortion of reconIf we use is bit rate allocated to texture data, is structed video, motion data, is bit rate for motion data, the optimization subject to the total bit rate problem is to minimize . Using the Lagrange constraint approach, it leads to the optimum problem as (8) and the solution is given in (9) (8)
as the set of pixels in the operator is dened as
that is mapped from. Therefore, based on Barbell lifting (5)
(9)

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It means that the texture and motion stream should achieve the equal R-D slope on its respective distortion-rate curve. We propose a layered structure for the representation of motion data in [30], which consists of multiple layers, . These motion layers are selected with . During the motion different lambda , its previous layer estimation and coding of the layer is used as prediction. The motion data can be rened in two ways: increasing the accuracy of motion vector or splitting a block into smaller subblocks. When two adjacent motion layers have different resolutions, the motion vectors in lower layer should be scaled and the macroblock partition modes should be converted before they are used as predictors. The layered motion is applied to our coding scheme in the following way. Encoder uses the nest motion to perform temporal transform on video frames. This accurate motion provides efcient energy compaction and guarantees optimal coding performance with bit rate increasing. But the decoder may receive only some of these motion layers for synthesis when bit rate is low, giving a higher priority to textures. When motion used in encoder and decoder is different, perfect reconstruction cannot be obtained even if all texture coefcients are decoded without losses. From the observations in [30], the distortion produced by motion mismatch is nearly constant in terms of mean square error (MSE) in a wide range of bit rate for texture. In other words, the distortion from motion mismatch is highly independent of texture quantization. This facilitates the estimation of the rate distortion property of the compressed texture and moto denote the distortion function tion data. Let us use . Since a bit rate of is allowhen decoder employs is allocated to texture, it cated to motion and can be approximated by (10) The rst item in the right side of (10) is the quantized dis, and the second item is the distortion tortion with motion of motion mismatch. Based on (10), the R-D optimized motion layer selection can be performed during stream truncation in either frame level or sequence level. Besides the proposed layered motion coding used in the Barbell-lifting coding scheme, Secker et al. also propose a scalable motion representation by applying subband transform and bit plane coding on motion eld [42], [22]. Furthermore, the effect of motion parameter quantization on the reconstructed video distortion is estimated based on the power spectrum of reference frame. C. Entropy Coding in Brief After temporal transform and 2-D spatial wavelet transform, spatio–temporal subbands are available for entropy coding. Taking each spatio–temporal subband as a three-dimensional coefcient volume, we code it bit plane by bit plane using context-based adaptive arithmetic coding technique. The entropy coding is similar to the EBCOT algorithm [43], [44] employed in JPEG-2000. But unlike the coding in JPEG-2000, the coding of 3-D wavelet coefcients involves exploiting correlations
in all three dimensions. We proposed a coding algorithm 3-D-ESCOT [25] as an extension of EBCOT. We divide each spatio–temporal subband into coding blocks and code each block separately bit plane by bit plane. For each bit plane, three coding passes are applied. The signicance propagation pass codes the signicance information for the coefcients which are still insignicant but have signicant neighbors. The magnitude renement pass codes the renement information for the coefcients that have already become signicant. And the normalization pass codes the signicance information for the remaining insignicant coefcients. In 3-D-ESCOT, the formation of the contexts to code the signicance information and the magnitude renement information involves both temporal and spatial neighboring coefcients. Furthermore, the correlation of temporal coefcients is often stronger than that of spatial coefcients. Besides 3-D-ESCOT used in the Barbell-lifting coding scheme, 3-D EZBC [47], 3-D SPIHT [45], and EMDC [46] are other approaches to code 3-D wavelet coefcients. 3-D EZBC and 3-D SPIHT use zero-tree algorithm to exploit the strong cross-subband dependency in the quadtree of subband coefcients. Furthermore, to code the signicance of the quadtree nodes, the context-based arithmetic coding is used. The EMDC algorithm [46] predicts the clusters of signicant coefcients by means of some form of morphological dilation. D. Base Layer Embedding As mentioned above, the MCTF decomposes original frames temporally in an open-loop manner. It means that the decomposition at encoder does not take the reconstruction of video frames at decoder into account. Open-loop decomposition makes the encoder simple because no reconstruction is needed. However, the weakness of no reconstruction at the encoder is that for a certain bit rate, the encoder does not know the mismatch between the encoder and the decoder so that the coding performance cannot be well optimized. For instance, at the encoder, original frames are used in motion compensation, motion estimation and mode decision. While at the decoder, reconstructed frames will actually be used. The motion data and coding mode estimated on original frames may not be optimum for the motion compensation on reconstructed frames. The mismatch is large when the quality of the reconstructed frame is low, for example, at low bit rate. That deteriorates the coding performance especially at low bit rate. To improve the coding performance at low bit rate, we incorporate a base layer into the Barbell-lifting coding scheme, which is coded using a close-loop standard codec. Another advantage in doing so is that such a base layer provides the compatibility to the standard coding scheme. Furthermore, the base layer can further exploit the redundancy within the temporal lowpass subband without introducing further coding delay. Suppose that a base layer is embedded into the Barbell-lifting MCTF. coding scheme after the th level The output lowpass video after MCTF is , with a frame , where is the frame rate of the original video. rate of , a down-sampled version of , is fed to a standard video codec, e.g., H.264/MPEG-AVC, where () is a downsampling operator. Let ENC() and DEC() denote the base layer

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encoding and decoding processes. We can get the reconstructed frames at the low resolution by
(11) The reconstructed frames are both available at the encoder and the decoder, which provide a low resolution and low frame-rate base layer at a certain bit rate. The coding of base layer can be fully optimized as done in H.264/AVC. Any standard compliant decoder can decode this base layer. The up-sampled version of the reconstructed frames is also used as a prediction candidate in the prediction step of th MCTF the remaining MCTF. For example, in the , for those macroblocks which use base layer as prediction, the prediction step is (12) And for those macroblocks, no update step is performed. To make the base layer coding to t for the spatial transform of the Barbell-lifting coding scheme, the down-sampling operator is to extract the lowpass subband after one or several levels' spatial wavelet transform. And the up-sampling operate is the corresponding wavelet synthesis process.
spatio–temporal subbands. In a given frame-rate and resolution required, a certain set of spatio–temporal subbands corresponding to that spatio–temporal resolution are extracted and sent to the decoder. Decorrelation is achieved by temporal and 2-D spatial wavelet transforms. The advantage is to represent the signal in a multiresolution way so that scalability is inherently supported. The disadvantage of the top-town structure is that it may not favor the coding performance at low resolution or bit rate, since all the decomposition is done with open-loop structure and on the full resolution. B. Temporal Decorrelation Temporal decorrelation is one of the most important issues in video coding. Although MCTF can be supported at the encoder, the close-loop hierarchical B-structure [51], is the de facto decorrelation process in SVC. Suppose a M-level hierarchical B-prediction is performed on video sequence , the th level prediction can be expressed as
(13) III. COMPARISONS WITH SVC The H.264/AVC scalable extension, or SVC standard in short, is a new scalable video coding standard developed jointly by ITU-T and ISO [48]. The SVC standard was originally developed from the HHI proposal [49], which extends the hybrid video coding approach of H.264/AVC towards MCTF [50]. Since both schemes are developed from MCTF, they have many commonalities, especially in the temporal decorrelation part. They also have many differences. In this section, we discuss the major commonalities and differences of the Barbell-lifting video coding to the SVC standard. A. Coding Framework The SVC standard uses a bottom-up layered structure to fulll scalabilities, which is similar to the scalability supported in previous MPEG and ITU-T standards. A base layer is coded using H.264/AVC compliant encoder to provide a reconstruction at low resolution, low frame-rate and/or low bit rate. An enhancement layer that may be predicted from the base layer is coded to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) quality for SNR scalability or to provide a higher resolution for spatial scalability. Multiple-level of scalability is supported by multiple enhancement layers. Once several lower layers are given, the coding of the current layer can be optimized, which leads to a one-by-one layer optimization. However, inefcient inter-layer prediction can not totally remove the redundancy in neighboring layers and will sacrice the performance in the higher layers. Unlike the SVC standard, the Barbell-lifting scheme uses a top-down coding structure. As mentioned above, video signal is decomposed temporally, horizontally and vertically to where is the residual frame after prediction and is the reconstructed image of , which is available at both the encoder is dened as in Section II-A. Basically it and the decoder. th MCTF. corresponds to the prediction stage at the The difference is that the prediction in the close-loop hierarchical B-structure is generated from the reconstructed images, while the MCTF is performed on the original images. Since in the case of lossy coding, the decoder cannot get the original images, mismatch exists at the prediction stage of MCTF between the encoder and the decoder. It may cause coding performance degradation, especially at low bit rate, where the mismatch between the original images and the reconstructed images is large. The other difference is that there is no update step in the hierarchical B-prediction while there is in MCTF. The update step in MCTF, together with the prediction step, constructs a lowpass lter that makes the output lowpass frames smooth so that they can be better coded. It has been observed that update step is effective to improve the coding performance in 3-D wavelet video coding. However, in most cases, the update step in SVC does not show much difference in terms of coding performance. Even for some cases in which the update step improves the coding performance in SVC, the gain can be similarly achieved by a preltering. A possible reason for the different coding performance improvement of the update step in SVC and in 3-D wavelet coding is that in SVC, integer approximation is applied on both temporal decorrelation and spatial transform. This may absorb most signals at the update step, which are often of low energy. Despite of these differences, the close-loop hierarchical B-prediction and MCTF have similar prediction structure. Actually, if highpass temporal frames are skipped, the close-loop

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Fig. 3. Encoding and decoding process for spatial scalability in the Barbell-lifting coding scheme.
hierarchical B-prediction and MCTF are the same at the decoder because both prediction steps are performed on the reconstructed images. The hierarchical prediction structure can both exploit the short-term correlation and the long-term one. Most frames are predicted bidirectionally in both structures. That accounts for why both schemes have shown signicant coding performance gains over the H.264/AVC codec in traditional I-B-P prediction structure. The paper [52] gives an analysis on hierarchical B-frames and MCTF.
D. Intra Prediction As an extension of H.264/AVC, SVC still uses block-based DCT transform for spatial decorrelation. Such block-based transform enables that each macroblock can be reconstructed instantly after the encoding to assist the coding of neighboring blocks. Intra prediction in H.264/AVC and SVC are such technology. By further introducing several directional intra prediction modes, H.264 can efciently exploited the directional correlation within the images. It can signicantly improve the coding performance of intra-frame and intra-macroblocks in Por B- frames. However, similar technology is relatively difcult to use in 3-D wavelet video coding since the spatial transform of each macroblock is not independent. IV. ADVANCES IN 3-D WAVELET VIDEO CODING There are still several challenges in scalable video coding. The rst one is how to achieve efcient spatial scalability. Both the Barbell-lifting coding scheme and SVC suffer from considerable performance degradation when spatial scalability is enabled. The second one is about how to further improve the performance of temporal decorrelation. Two techniques, in-scale MCTF and subband adaptive MCTF, are developed although the integrated Barbell-lifting coding scheme is not available yet in MPEG. A. In-Scale Motion Compensated Temporal Filtering As shown in Fig. 3, the temporal transform is performed prior to the 2-D spatial transform in the encoder of the Barbell-lifting coding scheme. When a low-resolution video is requested at the decoder, spatial highpass subbands higher than the target resolution are dropped. The other subbands are decoded by inverse wavelet transform and inverse MCTF at low resolution to reconstruct the target video. Two kinds of mismatches exist between the encoder and the decoder in Fig. 3. First, MCTF at the encoder and the decoder is performed at different resolutions, which results in artifacts at those regions with complex motion [53]. Second, as reported in [53]–[55], all the spatial subbands of video signal are coupled during the MCTF process due to motion alignment. The dropped spatial highpass subbands are effectively referenced
C. Spatial Scalability In the layered coding scheme of SVC, spatial scalability is supported by coding multiple resolution layers. The original full-resolution input video is down-sampled to provide input at lower resolution layers. To exploit cross-layer redundancy, the reconstructed images at a lower resolution can be used as prediction for some macroblocks when the prediction within current resolution is not effective. The advantage is that the different resolution input can be exibly chosen, which enables arbitrary down-sampling to generate low resolution video and nondyadic spatial scalability. However, in the coding of a higher-resolution video, many macroblocks do not use the lower resolution as prediction, which means the corresponding bits at lower resolution do not contribute to the coding of higher resolution. That affects the coding performance in spatial scalability scenarios. In the Barbell-lifting coding scheme, any lower resolution video is always embedded in higher-resolution video. The spatial lowpass subbands are used to reconstruct the low resolution video. Because of the critical sampling of the wavelet transform, the number of transform coefcients to be coded is the same as the number of pixels, even when multiple spatial scalability levels are supported. Bits of the lowpass subband contribute both to the lower resolution layer and the higher resolution layer. However, the constraint is that the low-resolution video is corresponding to the wavelet lowpass lter, which may not t for all applications. It is also difcult to support arbitrary ratio of spatial scalability, since dyadic wavelet transform is generally used.

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Fig. 4. Lifting steps of in-scale MC temporal ltering. (a) RefrenceFrame. (b) Redundant LiftingFrame. (c) LiftingFrame. (d) Composed LiftingFrame. (e) TargetFrame.
during the temporal transform at encoder. But they become unavailable at decoder, and thus resulting in extra reconstruction error. To remove the rst kind of mismatch, several modied decoding schemes are investigated in [53]. To solve the second kind of mismatch, a new rate allocation scheme is proposed in [56] and [57], which allocates part of bit budget to spatial highpass subbands based on their importance in reconstruction. The better way to solve the problem of spatial scalability is from the aspect of coding structure. Thus, an elegant in-scale MCTF is rst proposed in [58] and [59], as shown in Fig. 4. Assume there are three resolutions to be supported. Besides input resolution of frames denoted by subscript 2, two low-resolution versions, denoted by subscript 1 and 0, respectively, are generated by the wavelet lter that is also used in spatial transform. These frames constitute a redundant pyramid representation of original frames. But the multiresolution temporal transform is designed as a whole so that coded coefcients are not redundant. The multiresolution temporal transform is depicted in Fig. 4. First, from Fig. 4(a) to (b), each independent motion compento gensation is performed on reference frame erate corresponding prediction. Second, from Fig. 4(b) to (c), one-level wavelet transform, which has lters identical to those in spatial transform, is performed on each prediction except for that of the lowest resolution. The lowpass subband of each prediction is dropped in Fig. 4(c). Third, from Fig. 4(c) to (d), a new prediction is generated by inverse transforming the remaining highpass subbands and all information available in all low-resare used in the olution layers. Finally, the signal temporal lifting transform. In this way, the signal at a lower resolution layer is always exactly the wavelet lowpass subband of the signal at the next higher resolution layer. Thus, redundancy can be removed. The proposed in-scale transform can also be described in and the Barbell lifting framework. We dene as analysis and synthesis operators of -level DWT. After is n-level DWT, denotes the subband the set of subband index, and of any frame . For example, is the coarsest scale of are ner scales containing and high-frequency details at high resolutions. With these notations, the in-scale lifting steps are formulated as follows.
For odd , the th lifting step modies odd-indexed frames based on the even-indexed frames. The lifting step for lowpass subband at the coarsest scale is performed according to (14), and the lifting steps for subbands at ner scales are performed according to (15). For even , the th lifting step modies evenindexed frames based on the odd-indexed frames similarly, as formulated in (16) and (17)
(14)
(15)
(16)
(17) In fact, the operator can be viewed as a part of . But, to easily understand (14)–(17), we keep it in the separate manner. The performance of the proposed technique in wavelet video coding can be found in [58] and [59]. Furthermore, the in-scale motion compensation technique is also applicable to current SVC because of the pyramidal multiresolution coding structure in SVC. We extended the in-scale technique to support arbitrary up- and down-sampling lters and applied it to SVC in both open-loop and close-loop form, with macroblock-level R-D optimized mode selection [60]–[62]. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques can signicantly improve the spatial scalability performance of SVC, especially when the bit

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Fig. 5. Correlation coefcients between a frame and its prediction in different subbands.
rate ratio of lower resolution bit stream to higher resolution bit stream is considerable [63]. B. Subband Adaptive Motion Compensated Temporal Filtering In general, a frame to be coded highly correlates with previous frames and this correlation can be exploited by generating a prediction through motion compensation. The correlation strength is dependent on the distance between this frame and its references and the accuracy of estimated motion vectors. Besides, for a pair of the current frame and its prediction, the correlation strength also varies in different spatial frequency components. As shown in Fig. 5, there is a frame to be coded and its prediction. After packet wavelet transform, 16 subbands are generated. The correlation coefcients between them in different subbands are quite different. For example, the correlation of lowpass subband is 0.98 but that of the highest subband is only 0.08. It motivates us to differentiate various spatial subbands during MCTF. The basic idea comes from the optimum prediction problem of random signals. Let and be two correlated random signals, and we predict from by a linear model . The optimum parameter to minimize the mean square prediction error can be solved as (18) In the case , and , the (18) . It means the best paramcan be approximated to eter to achieve the optimum prediction is mainly determined by the correlation of the two signals. Therefore, we similarly adjust the strength of temporal ltering for various spatial subbands. It is formulated as follows. For odd , the th lifting step modies odd-indexed frames based on the even-indexed frames. The lifting step is performed for each subband as in (19). For even , the th lifting step modies even-indexed frames based on the odd-indexed frames similarly, as in (20). The parameters and are determined by characteristic of subband-wise temporal correlation in the th MCTF according can to the method discussed in [64]. Similarly, the operator
. But, to easily understand (19) be also viewed as a part of and (20), we keep it in the separate manner. The performance gain of this technique is reported in [64].
(19)
(20) V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS In this section, we conduct experiments to evaluate the coding performance of the proposed Barbell-lifting coding scheme. In Section V-A, we compare our scheme to MC-EZBC [17], [19], a well-recognized scheme in the literature of 3-D wavelet video coding. In Sections V-B and V-C, we compare our scheme to SVC, the state-of-the-art scalable coding standard, from the aspect of SNR scalability and combined scalability, respectively. A. Comparison With MC-EZBC We compare the Barbell lifting scheme with MC-EZBC in this subsection. Only SNR scalability is considered here. Experiments are conducted with the Bus, Foreman, Coastguard, Mobile, Stefan, and Silence CIF 30 Hz sequences which represent different kinds of video. For MC-EZBC, two versions are investigated. One is the old scheme described in MPEG document m9034 [65], in which a comprehensive summary on its SNR scalability performance is provided. The other one is the latest improved MC-EZBC developed by RPI [66]. Its performance is obtained based on the executables and congurations provided by Dr. Yongjun Wu and Professor John W. Woods.

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Fig. 6. Coding performance comparison between MSRA Barbell codec and MC-EZBC.
To obtain the performance of our proposed scheme, the bit rate ranges in [65] are used. Four-level MCTF is applied for all sequences. The resulting temporal subbands are spatially decomposed by a Spacl transform [70]. Base layer coding is not enabled in this experiment. The lambdas for motion estimation at all MCTF levels are set to 16 in our scheme. Fig. 6 shows the results of our Barbell-lifting coding scheme, basic MC-EZBC (MPEG m9034) and the latest improved MC-EZBC. From Fig. 6, one can see that for each sequence, the Barbell-lifting coding scheme and improved MC-EZBC scheme outperforms the basic MC-EZBC (m9034) over a wide bit rate range. The PSNR gain can be about 1.3–3.2 dB. The Barbelllifting coding scheme still performs better than the improved MC-EZBC scheme. Since many differences exist among the three schemes, it is difcult to analyze which part of the coding algorithm leads to performance difference and how much. But the main reasons accounting for the gain may be the following. 1) In basic MC-EZBC, Haar transform is used in MCTF while in the Barbell-lifting coding scheme, 5/3 lter is used. The lter is bidiprediction step of wavelet transform using rectional, which is more effective than the uni-directional prediction in Haar transform. The difference between them is similar to the difference between B-picture coding and P-picture coding in video coding standards. And lowpass is better than that of Haar in terms of lowlter of pass property, which makes the lowpass subband generated lter to be easier to be coded. using 2) In the Barbell-lifting coding scheme, adaptively choosing the Barbell functions contributes to the performance gain. Variable block-size motion model similar to the one in H.264/AVC is used, with ve motion coding modes, which has been shown to be effective. It makes a good tradeoff between the prediction efciency and the overhead of motion
information. Moreover, overlapped block motion compensation and the update operator matching with the prediction step further improve the efciency of temporal decomposition of the video signals. B. Comparison With SVC for SNR Scalability We also compare our proposed scheme with the latest SVC under the testing conditions dened by JVT [67]. First, we test the SNR scalability performance of both schemes. For SVC, its performance is quoted directly from JVT-T008 [68], which presents the results of the latest stable JSVM reference software, i.e., JSVM6[56]. To obtain the performance of our proposed scheme, the parameters for MCTF level are set to 5, 5, 4, 4, 4 and 2, for Mobile, Foreman, Bus, Harbour, Crew, and Football, respectively. For each sequence, the spatio–temporal lowpass subband is coded as a base layer by a H.264/AVC codec. Temporal subbands are further spatially decomposed by a three-level Spacl DWT transform. The lambdas for motion estimation at all MCTF levels are set to 16. Fig. 7 shows the performance of our scheme and the SVC (JVT-T008). In general, the Barbell-lifting coding scheme works worse than SVC in the testing conditions of SNR scalability. In spite of that SVC has been developed and optimized extensively by JVT, there are still several possible reasons for the performance differences. 1) The close loop prediction structure of SVC can reduce or remove the mismatch of the prediction between the encoder and the decoder. However, for the open-loop prediction structure in the Barbell lifting scheme, the mismatch degrades the coding performance. Although the base layer is used in the Barbell lifting scheme, it only improves the efciency of the spatio–temporal lowpass subband. It does not contribute to the coding of other subbands and reduce

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Fig. 7. Coding performance comparison between MSRA Barbell codec and SVC for SNR scalability.
Fig. 8. Coding performance comparison between MSRA Barbell codec and SVC for combined scalability.
mismatch. However, for 4CIF sequences which are coded at comparatively high bit rate to lead to fewer mismatches, the performance gaps between these two schemes become
small. In some cases, e.g., with Harbour sequence, the Barbell-lifting coding scheme can even outperform the SVC.

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2) In SVC, each macroblock is reconstructed instantly after its encoding. It enables effective intra prediction of the next macroblock. However, the absence of intra prediction prevents our scheme from efciently coding the macroblocks where motion compensation does not work well. That accounts for why the performance gap is large for Football and Foreman sequences, which are either high motion sequences or have complex motion. C. Comparison With SVC for Combined Scalability The combined testing conditions dened in [67] support both SNR scalability and spatial scalability. The stream to decode the low-resolution video is extracted from the one of high resolution. In the Barbell-lifting coding scheme, a low-resolution video corresponds to the video down-sampled from a high-resolter lution one using wavelet lowpass lter, specically the used in coding. Therefore, we also use the video down-sampled wavelet lter as the low-resolution input in SVC, by with although it can support arbitrary down-sampling lter. Using the same down-sampling lter makes it possible to compare the low-resolution reconstruction qualities of the two schemes in PSNR. For SVC, the conguration le in JVT-T008 [68] is reused except that the QP is adjusted slightly to support the lowest bit rate specied in [67]. Bitstream is adapted to the given bit rate using quality layers. In the Barbell-lifting scheme, the number of MCTF levels are 5, 4, 3 and 2 for Mobile, Foreman, Bus, and Football, respectively. The lambdas are set to comparatively large values to favor the performance at low resolution. Fig. 8 shows the comparison results for Foreman, Football, Mobile and Bus sequences in CIF format. For the performance at low resolution, the Barbell-lifting coding scheme is still worse than SVC for the same reason addressed in Section V-B and the mismatch of MCTF between the encoder and the decoder. But for the performance at high resolution, the Barbell-lifting coding scheme shows a coding performance close to SVC. For Football sequence, the Barbell lifting scheme even outperforms SVC by up to 0.6 dB, in spite of the higher bit rate at the low resolution. The reason may come from the different structures to support spatial scalability, as described in Section III-C. The inter-layer redundancy in SVC may lead to the coding performance degradation at high resolution, especially when the bit rate of the low resolution is high. However, for the Barbell-lifting coding scheme, the embedded structure of spatio–temporal decomposition aligns the coding of the low resolution and that of the high resolution. VI. CONCLUSION This paper rst overviews the Barbell-lifting coding scheme. The commonalities and differences between the Barbell-lifting coding scheme and SVC are then exhibited for readers to better understand modern scalable video coding technologies. Finally, we also discuss two new techniques to further improve the performance of the wavelet-based scalable coding scheme. They are also suitable for SVC. From the comparisons with SVC in terms of technique and performance, there is still a long way to go in wavelet-based
video coding. For example, intra-blocks in highpass frame are difcult to code efciently because of global spatial transform; up-sampling and down-sampling lters are constrained to those used in spatial transform, which may result in aliasing visual artifacts at low resolution video; and, an R-D-optimized result is difcult to be achieved because of the open-loop prediction structure used in 3-D wavelet video coding. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank Dr. L. Luo, X. Ji, Dr. D. Zhang, B. Feng, and Dr. L. Song for their contributions in developing the Barbell-lifting coding scheme. They also thank Dr. Y. Wu and Prof. J. W. Woods for providing the binary executable and conguration les of the latest MC-EZBC coding scheme. REFERENCES
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[68] M. Wien and H. Schwarz, "AHG on Coding eff & JSVM coding efciency testing conditions," in Joint Video Team of ISO/IEC MPEG & ITU-T VCEG, JVT-T008, Klagenfurt, Austria, Jul. 2007. [69] J. Vieron, M. Wien, and H. Schwarz, "JSVM 6 software," in Joint Video Team of ISO/IEC MPEG & ITU-T VCEG, JVT-S203, Geneva, Switzerland, Mar.–Apr. 2006. [70] C. Christopoulos, "JPEG2000 verication model 8.5," in ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1 WG1 N1878, Sep. 2000. Ruiqin Xiong received the B.S. degree in computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, China, in 2001. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. He has been with Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, as an Intern since 2003. His research interests include image and video compression and visual signal communications and processing. He was active in the MPEG SVC activity from 2004 to 2006. He has authored over a dozen of conference and journal papers and led ve U.S. patents. Mr. Xiong was the recipient of Microsoft Fellowship 2004 and Best Student Paper Award of SPIE VCIP 2005.
Feng Wu (M'99–SM'06) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Xidian University, Xidian, China, in 1992, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 1996 and 1999, respectively. He joined in Microsoft Research China, Beijing, China, as an Associated Researcher in 1999. He has been a researcher with Microsoft Research Asia since 2001. His research interests include image and video representation, media compression and communication, computer vision and graphics. He has been an active contributor to ISO/MPEG and ITU-T standards. Some techniques have been adopted by MPEG-4 FGS, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and the coming H.264 SVC standard. He served as the Chairman of China AVS video group in 2002–2004 and led the efforts on developing China AVS video standard 1.0. He has authored or co-authored over 100 conference and journal papers. He has about 30 U.S. patents granted or pending in video and image coding.
Jizheng Xu (M'07) received the B.S. degree in computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, China, in 2000, and the M.S. degree in computer science from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in 2003. He joined Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), Beijing, China, in 2003 as an Assistant Researcher and is currently an Associate Researcher. His research interests include image and video representation, media compression, and communication. He has been an active contributor to ISO/MPEG ITU-T video coding standards. Some technologies have been adopted by H.264/AVC and H.264/AVC scalable extension. He chaired and co-chaired ad hoc group of exploration on wavelet video coding of MPEG during January 2005–April 2006. He has authored or co-authored over 40 conference and journal papers.
Shipeng Li (M'97) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, China, in 1988 and 1991, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, in 1996, all in electrical engineering. He was with the Electrical Engineering Department, USTC, during 1991–1992. He was a Member of Technical Staff with Sarnoff Corporation, Princeton, NJ, during 1996–1999. He has been a Researcher with Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, since May 1999 and has contributed some technologies in MPEG-4 and H.264. His research interests include image/video compression and communications, digital television, multimedia, and wireless communication.

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