Opening the Laplacian pyramid for video coding

Laplacian pyramids are used in the framework of scalable video coding to efficiently provide spatial scalability. In literature, closed-loop schemes are adopted to implement such codecs. Closed-loop introduces complexity and optimization drawbacks. In this paper we investigate mechanisms to provide an open loop version of the Laplacian pyramid. We call our approach the Laplacian pyramid with update (LPU). In this scheme, different filter-banks can be used: we propose an intuitive framework to design filters that provides efficient video coding. The interesting result of this work is that LPU enables coding performances at least equivalent to those reported for closed loop Laplacian pyramids with advantages both in terms of complexity, rate-distortion optimization and independence of the qualities of the different resolutions.