Treating the temporal direction of subband-coded images has in the pas
t involved a choice between temporal subband decomposition, which allo
ws scalable (partial bit-stream) decoding but may reduce the coding ef
ficiency, or motion-compensated coding, which can be more efficient bu
t is not scalable. We propose a motion-compensated subband coder which
preserves the scalability of the representation, and demonstrate its
application in conjunction with a novel bit allocation process.