  Nowadays, real-time video communication over the internet through video
conferencing applications has become an invaluable tool in everyone's
professional and personal life. This trend underlines the need for video coding
algorithms that provide acceptable quality on low bitrates and can support
various resolutions inside the same stream in order to cope with limitations on
computational resources and network bandwidth. In this work, a novel scalable
video coding algorithm based on the contourlet transform is presented. The
algorithm utilizes both lossy and lossless methods in order to achieve
compression. One of its most notable features is that due to the transform
utilised, it does not suffer from blocking artifacts that occur with many
widely adopted compression algorithms. The proposed algorithm takes advantage
of the vast computational capabilities of modern GPUs, in order to achieve
real-time performance and provide satisfactory encoding and decoding times at
relatively low cost, making it suitable for applications like video
conferencing. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm performs
satisfactorily in terms of compression ratio and speed, while it outperforms
standard methods in terms of perceptual quality on lower bitrates.
