ABSTRACT

The biggest obstacle to the multimedia revolution is digital obesity. This is the blot that occurs when pictures, sound and video are converted from their natural analog form into computer language for manipulation or transmission. In the present explosion of high quality data, the need to compress it with less distortion of data is the need of the hour. Compression lowers the cost of storage and transmission by packing data into a smaller space.

One of the main areas of advanced form of compression is wavelet compression. Wavelet Video Processing Technology offers some alluring features, including high compression ratios and eye pleasing enlargements.

The wavelet technology has provided an efficient framework of multi resolution spacefrequency representation with promising applications in video processing. Discrete wavelet transform(DWT) is becoming increasingly important in visual applications because of its flexibility in representing non-stationary signals such as images and video sequences. Waveletbased coding provides substantial improvement in picture quality at low bit rates because of overlapping bases function and better energy compaction property of wavelet transforms. Because of the inherent multi resolution nature wavelet based codes facilitate progressive transmission of images thereby allowing variable bit rates. The JPEG-2000 standard incorporates wavelet technology.JPEG 2000 was created as the follow-up to the successful JPEG compression, with better compression ratios. The basis was to incorporate new advances in picture compression research into an international standard. Instead of the DCT transformation, JPEG 2000 uses the wavelet transformation.

Classifying image data:

important one. But most natural images have smooth colour variations, with the fine details being represented as sharp edges in between the smooth variations. Technically, the smooth variations in colour can be termed as low frequency variations and the sharp variations as high frequency variations.

The low frequency components constitute the base of an image and the high frequency components add upon them to refine the image thereby giving a detailed image. Hence the smooth variations are demanding more importance than the details.

Separating the smooth variations and details of the image can be done in many ways. One such way is the decomposition of the image using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT).

DWT of an image:
A low pass filter and a high pass filter are chosen, such that they exactly halve the frequency range between themselves. The filter pass is called the analysis filter pair. First the low pass filter is applied for each row of data, thereby getting the low frequency components of the row. But since the low pass filter is a half band filter, the output data contains frequencies only in the first half of the original frequency range. So they can be
subsampled by two, so that the output data now contains only half the original number of samples. Now the high pass filter is applied for the same row of data, and similarly the high pass components are separated and placed by the side of the low pass components. This procedure is done for all rows.

Next, the filtering is done for each column of the intermediate data. The resulting two dimensional array of coefficients contains four bands of data, each labeled as LL(low- Low), HL (high-low), LH (Low-High) and HH (High-High). The LL band can be decomposed once again

in the same manner, thereby producing even more subbands. This can be done up to any level, thereby resulting in a pyramidal decomposition as shown.

The LL band at the highest level can be classified as most important and the other detail bands can be classified as of lesser importance, with the degree of importance decreasing from the top of the pyramid to the bands at the bottom.

Applying 3D wavelet transform to digital video is a logical extension to the 2D analysis. Most video compression techniques use 2D coding to achieve spatial compression and motion compensated difference coding in the time domain. Most of these techniques involved complicated and expensive hardware. By applying the wavelet transform in all the three dimensions, the computational complexity of coding while achieving high rates of compression can be reduced, depending on the coding strategy. Video compression techniques, which only remove spatial redundancy, cannot be highly effective. To achieve higher compression ratios the similarity of successive video frames has to be exploited.