Influence of downsampling filter characteristics on compression performance in wavelet-based scalable video coding

The application of different downsampling filters in video coding directly models visual information at lower resolutions and influences the compression performance of a chosen coding system. In wavelet-based scalable video coding the spatial scalability is achieved by the application of wavelets as downsampling filters. However, characteristics of different wavelets influence the performance at targeting spatio-temporal decoding points. An analysis of different downsampling filters in popular wavelet-based scalable video coding schemes is presented. Evaluation is performed for both intra- and inter-coding schemes using wavelets and standard downsampling strategies. On the basis of the obtained results a new concept of inter-resolution prediction is proposed, which maximises the average performance using a combination of standard downsampling filters and wavelet-based coding.