Algorithms and architectures for hierarchical compression of video

The paper addresses the problem of collaborative video over “heterogeneous” networks. Current standards for video compression are not designed to deal with this problem. We define an additional set of metrics (ie., in addition to the standard rate versus distortion measure) to evaluate compression algorithms for this application. We also present an efficient algorithm and corresponding architectures for video compression in such an environment. The algorithm is a unique combination of the discrete wavelet transform and hierarchical vector quantization. It is unique in that both the encoder and the decoder are implemented with only table lookups. This makes both the software and hardware implementations very efficient and cheap