The trend towards digital video has created huge demands all the link bandwidth required to carry the digital stream, giving rise to the growing research into video compression schemes. General video compression standards, which focus on providing the best compression for any type of video scene, have been shown to perform badly at low bit rates and thus are not often used for such applications. A suitable low bit rate scheme would be one that achieves a reasonable degree of quality over a range of compression ratios, while perhaps being limited to a small set of specific applications. One such application specific scheme. as presented in this thesis, is to provide a differentiated image quality, allowing a user-defined region of interest to be reproduced at a higher quality than the rest of the image. The thesis begins by introducing some important concepts that are used for video compression followed by a survey of relevant literature concerning the latest developments in video compression research. A video compression scheme, based on the Wavelet transform, and using an application specific idea, is proposed and implemented on a digital signal processor (DSP), the Philips Trimedia TM·1300. The scheme is able to capture and compress the video stream and transmit the compressed data via a low bit· rate serial link to be decompressed and displayed on a video monilor. A wide range of flexibility is supported, with the ability to change various compression parameters 'on-the-fly', The compression allgorithm is controlled by a PC application that displays the decompressed video and the original video for comparison, while displaying useful rate metrics such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Details of implementation and practicality are discussed. The thesis then presents examples and results from both implementation and testing before concluding with suggestions for further improvement.

Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2001.