A new technique for motion estimation and compensation of the wavelet detail images

This work proposes a new block based motion estimation and compensation technique applied on the detail images of the wavelet pyramidal decomposition. The algorithm implements two block matching criteria, namely the absolute difference (AD) and the absolute sum (AS). To assess the coding performance of this method, we have implemented a software simulation of a wavelet video encoder based on our square partitioning coder. Coding results indicate a considerable image quality gain, expressed by PSNR values, of up to 3.4 dB compared to intra wavelet coding for the same bit rate. The quality gain, obtained by using two matching criteria (AS and AD) instead of one (AD), varies between 0.3 and 0.5 dB.