METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CODING MOTION PICTURES UTILIZING MOTION COMPENSATION

An improved motion picture coding scheme is described which provides the benefits of both sub-band coding and motion compensation thereby providing greater degrees of compression than would be obtained using either of these techniques separately. The system generates high and low frequency frames from each pair of frames in the original motion picture. The high frequency represents the difference between the first and second frames of the motion picture. The pixels of the low frequency frame are either the average of two corresponding pixels, one from each of the original frames, or a value derived from a single pixel in the first frame. In the later case, the derived value is chosen to minimize artifacts that could hamper further compression of the low-frequency frame based on sub-band coding.