Integrated compression and indexing of video in the wavelet domain

The multitude of visual media-based applications demands sophisticated compression and indexing techniques for efficient storage, transmission and retrieval of images and video. Compressed domain techniques are becoming popular due to their inherent advantages of efficiency and reduced complexity. Wavelet transform is emerging as a powerful tool for efficient compression of visual information. A variety of wavelet based video compression techniques have been reported in the literature. However, there has been little work done in the area of video indexing in the wavelet domain. This is crucial for consideration of wavelets as a potential candidate for multimedia applications, including standards such as MPEG-7. In this paper, we first present a brief review of waveletbased indexing techniques. We then propose an integrated video coding and indexing system in a wavelet compression framework. In the proposed system, the compression parameters associated with the video coder are employed in all steps of video indexing, namely video segmentation, extraction of temporal indexing (object motion and camera operations) and spatial indexing parameters. Simulation results show that the techniques proposed towards the design of the wavelet based integrated video coding and indexing system provide a good indexing performance at a low complexity.