In this paper, we propose the depth estimation and view synthesis approaches for the scene rendering of narrow-baseline videos. Depth estimation is performed by global energy minimization using graph cut technique. A novel smoothness energy term is proposed to enforce powerful smoothness of the estimated depth. In view synthesis, smart hole filling is proposed to efficiently remove the burr artifacts along the object boundary. Experimental results show that compared with the MPEG reference software, our method can generate more accurate depth maps and achieve much better objective (PSNR) and subjective quality in view synthesis.

This paper presents a 2-D pipeline-based locally adaptive inter-view-temporal lifting scheme for scalable multi-view video coding. Instead of global temporal and inter-view correlation analysis based on the whole picture, the proposed method adopts locally adaptive inter-view-temporal correlation analysis based on the macroblocks. In addition, in order to reduce the memory requirement and computational complexity and remove both of temporal and view boundary effects, a new 2-D pipeline-based lifting scheme is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme always outperforms the other tested schemes in coding efficiency, while providing several advantages, such as view scalability, pipeline-based processing, and moderate complexity.

This paper presents a novel 3-D direction aligned wavelet transform for scalable video coding. A new generalized 3- D directional threading technique is seamlessly incorporated into 3-D weighted adaptive lifting (WAL)-based wavelet transform to exploit the spatio-temporal correlation inside the video cube along the 3-D directional trajectory, leading to a new class of algorithm called 3-D direction aligned wavelet transform (DAWT). Experimental results show that the proposed 3-D WAL-based DAWT achieves better coding performance than the conventional 3-D discrete wavelet transform (3-D DWT).

This paper presents a 3-D shape-adaptive directional wavelet coding technique for object-based scalable video coding. This technique includes 3-D object-based directional threading and extensions of weighted adaptive lifting (WAL) scheme. The 3-D object-based directional threading, which unifies the concept of temporal motion threading and 2-D spatial directional threading, provides the opportunities to align a series of video object planes to form a 3-D video object and exploit the spatio-temporal correlation inside the 3-D video object. The WAL scheme, which is extended from 2-D frame-based image coding to 3-D object-based video coding, is employed to decompose the 3-D video object into a 3-D multispatio-temporal resolution video object pyramid for object-based scalable video coding. Experimental results show that the proposed 3-D shape-adaptive directional wavelet coding technique consistently outperforms MPEG-4 and other wavelet-based schemes for coding arbitrarily shaped video objects.

In this paper, a new weighted adaptive lifting (WAL)-based wavelet transform is presented. The proposed WAL approach is designed to solve the problems existing in the previous adaptive directional lifting (ADL) approach, such as mismatch between the predict and update steps, interpolation favoring only horizontal or vertical direction, and invariant interpolation filter coefficients for all images. The main contribution of the proposed approach consists of two parts: one is the improved weighted lifting, which maintains the consistency between the predict and update steps as far as possible and preserves the perfect reconstruction at the same time; another is the directional adaptive interpolation, which improves the orientation property of the interpolated image and adapts to statistical property of each image. Experimental results show that the proposed WAL-based wavelet transform for image coding outperforms the conventional lifting-based wavelet transform up to 3.06 dB in PSNR and significant improvement in subjective quality is also observed. Compared with the ADL-based wavelet transform, up to 1.22-dB improvement in PSNR is reported.

In this paper, we propose a new weighted adaptive lifting (WAL)-based wavelet transform that is designed to solve the problems existing in the previous adaptive directional lifting (ADL) approach. The proposed approach uses the weighted function to make sure that the prediction and update stages are consistent, the directional interpolation to improve the orientation property of interpolated image, and adaptive interpolation filter to adjust to statistical property of each image. Experimental results show that the proposed WAL-based wavelet transform for image coding outperforms the conventional lifting-based wavelet transform up to 3.02 dB in PSNR and significant improvement in subjective quality is also observed. Compared with the ADL approach, up to 1.18 dB improvement in PSNR is reported.

This paper extends the lifting-based motion threading technique from the frame-based coding to the object-based coding, attracted by the unique advantages of the object-based coding that do not exist in other coding schemes. The boundary effects, which exist in spatial and temporal wavelet transforms due to the manner of object-based coding, are well suppressed by 3D shape adaptive discrete wavelet transform (3D SA-DWT) via the lifting implementation in a unified framework. Based on the proposed object-based motion threading technique, a 3D object-based scalable wavelet video coder is developed. Experimental results show that the proposed coder achieves good performance compared with the existing object-based coders, and provides the scalability functionality at the same time.

This paper extends the lifting-based motion threading (MTh) technique from the frame-based coding to the object-based coding, attracted by the unique advantages of the object-based coding that do not exist in other coding schemes. The boundary effects, which exist in spatial and temporal wavelet transforms due to the manner of object-based coding, are well suppressed by 3-D shape-adaptive discrete wavelet transform (3D SA-DWT) via the lifting implementation in a unified framework. Based on the proposed object-based MTh technique, a 3-D object-based scalable wavelet video coder is developed. Experimental results show that the proposed coder achieves good performance compared with the existing object-based coders and provides the scalability functionality at the same time

In this paper, we propose a fast lossless multi-resolution motion estimation algorithm in shift-invariant wavelet domain by using wavelet matching error characteristic based partial distortion elimination (MR-WMEC-PDE). Due to its multi-resolution nature, the proposed approach can be applied to scalable video coding. The proposed algorithm can achieve the same estimate accuracy as full search algorithm (FSA), while needing much less computation requirement than FSA