THREE DIMENSIONAL MOTION COMPENSATED VIDEO CODING

A video signal encoder uses three dimensional transform coding on blocks of intensity values and then selects the most significant coefficients for further processing by separating the coefficients into several groups have approximately the same energy and thus approximately the same significance. The intensity values can be error values computed by forming the difference between the actual intensity values and values computed using conditional motion compensated interpolation or motion compensated prediction. The encoder can use both two dimensional and three dimensional transformations, and if desired, adaptively switch between those processing techniques. A complementary decoder recovers the intensity values from encoded signals.