水下视频图像压缩一直是有限带宽水声信道实时传输海量视频数据的关键技术之一。本文首先介绍了目前水下机器人和水下视频图像压缩研究存在的主要问题，并综合分析了目前几种高效视频压缩方法的特点并探讨了进一步研究的方向。此外，根据水下视频的成像特点，提出了高效的全局与局部运动混合补偿方案和基于小波变换的预处理方法。初步实验结果表明：本文提出的预处理方法可以有效去除视频图像中存在的大量视觉冗余和空间冗余，提出的混合运动补偿方案可以获得很高的压缩编码效率；但必须进一步研究快速、有效的全局运动估计方法。

Underwater video compression is one of the key technologies for transmitting massive amount of real-time video data via underwater acoustic channels with limited bandwidth. The authors first describe the major problems involved in the development of underwater robots and underwater video compression, then comprehensively analyze the characteristics of several efficient video-coding methods, and finally discuss the future research directions. According to the characteristics of underwater imaging, they propose a potential hybrid global-local motion compensation scheme and a wavelet transform based a preprocessing method. Preparatory experimental results show that the proposed preprocessing method could effectively remove the visual and spatial redundancy of underwater images and the proposed hybrid compensation scheme could achieve a very high compression ratio. Further investigation is necessary for a fast and robust computing method of global motion.