Invertible temporal subband/wavelet filter banks with half-pixel-accurate motion compensation

Three-dimensional (3-D) subband/wavelet coding with motion compensation has been demonstrated to be an efficient technique for video coding applications in some recent research works. When motion compensation is performed with half-pixel accuracy, images need to be interpolated in both temporal subband analysis and synthesis stages. The resulting subband filter banks developed in these former algorithms were not invertible due to image interpolation. In this paper, an invertible temporal analysis/synthesis system with half-pixel-accurate motion compensation is presented. We look at temporal decomposition of image sequences as a kind of down-conversion of the sampling lattices. The earlier motion-compensated (MC) interlaced/progressive scan conversion scheme is extended for temporal subband analysis/synthesis. The proposed subband/wavelet filter banks allow perfect reconstruction of the decomposed video signal while retaining high energy compaction of subband transforms. The invertible filter banks are then utilized in our 3-D subband video coder. This video coding system does not contain the temporal DPCM loop employed in the conventional hybrid coder and the earlier MC 3-D subband coders. The experimental results show a significant PSNR improvement by the proposed method. The generalization of our algorithm for MC temporal filtering at arbitrary subpixel accuracy is also discussed.