Public Source Code Release of Scalable Arithmetic Video Codec

A free experimental software codec for scalable video based on 3D-subband coding, progressive quantization and arithmetic coding [1,2] is provided by the Video and Image Processing (VIP) Laboratory in University of California at Berkeley. Click here to download the codec.

The software was developed by David Taubman as part of his Ph.D. thesis research. The emphasis of the software is on providing fine-scalability with good compression efficiency. Below is an abstract from the software's announcement:

"Unlike conventional compression standards, scalable codecs perform fully scalable compression of both video and images. This means that subsets may be extracted from the compressed data stream so as to satisfy virtually any constraint on bit rate and a wide range of compatible display frame resolutions and frame rates. That is, the video is compressed once only, after which scaling may occur to meet unpredictable demands imposed by storage, distribution and display systems."

The software was developed on SunOS 4.1 and compiles under HPUX-9 with minor modifications.

1. D.Taubman and A.Zakhor, Multirate 3-D Subband Coding of Video, IEEE Trans. Image Proc., Vol. 3, No. 5, pp 572-88, September 1994.
2. D.Taubman and A.Zakhor, Highly scalable, low-delay video compression. Proceedings ICIP-94, pp 740-744, November 1994.