This paper presents a SPIHT(set partition in hierarchical trees) and Motion Compensation Based Rate Scalable Video Compression algorithm. We will refer to this new technique as the Scalable Adaptive Motion Compensated SPIHT (SAMCS) algorithm

which can be used in video surveillance

video meeting

etc. SAMCS has three characteristics: Firstly

it uses adaptive Intra/Inter block coding and the lowest rate based reference frame reconstruction to adapt to the various bandwidth; Secondly

it makes wavelet transform on prediction error frame (PEF) to create a lot of zero pixels and achieve much higher compression rate; finally

SPIHT is a fine scalable coding

so SAMCS can get scalable rate bitestream based on the lowest rate reference frame reconstruction

which is very appealing for network-oriented application. Experimental results show that

SAMCS has an excellent performance on compressing low-motion video. For example

the PSNRs of Akiyo's three components(Y

U

V) are 36.33dB

40.22dB and 42.52dB by SAMCS at 27kbps

and the compression rate is 355∶1. As to high-motion video

such as Singer

the performance of SAMCS is no better than MPEG-4 VM. What's more

compared to MPEG-4 VM

the PSNRs of Y components is improved 4.0dB on the average at the highest bit-rate.