Wavelet-DCT Video Coding in Community Intelligent Tele-Monitoring and Healthcare System

A community intelligent tele-monitoring and healthcare system (CITMHS) based on video monitoring technology was developed. It has the functions of monitoring, healthcare and telediagnosis. A simple hybrid wavelet-DCT video-coding method was proposed to improve the real-time performance of the CITMHS. With the wavelet-DCT method, intraframe pictures of the video are coded with set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm, and interframes are coded with motion compensation (MC) and DCT combined method. In the method, a multi-resolution based three step search (MRTSS) motion estimation algorithm is adopted, for its less number of computations. Experimental results show that the proposed method can code the video data at a fast speed, with an acceptable video quality. Compared with the exiting video codec, it keeps a better real-time performance to meet the requirement of the CITMHS, and has a comparative video quality, especially in low bit rates