A Rate-Distortion Optimized Coding Method for Region of Interest in Scalable Video Coding

The support for region of interest (ROI) browsing, which allows dropping background part of video bitstreams, is a desirable feature for video applications. With the help of the slice group technique provided by H.264/SVC, rectangular ROI areas can be encoded into separate ROI slices. Additionally, by imposing certain constraints on motion estimation, ROI part of the bitstream can be decoded without background slices of the same layer. However, due to the additional spatial and temporal constraints applied to the encoder, overall coding efficiency would be significantly decreased. In this paper, a rate-distortion optimized (RDO) encoding scheme is proposed to improve the coding efficiency of ROI slices. When background slices are discarded, the proposed method uses base layer information to generate the prediction signal of the enhancement layer. Thus, the temporal constraints can be loosened during the encoding process. To do it in this way, the possible mismatch between generated reference frames and original ones is also considered during rate-distortion optimization so that a reasonable trade-off between coding efficiency and decoding drift can be made. Besides, a new Lagrange multiplier derivation method is developed for further coding performance improvement. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant bitrate saving compared to existing methods

Scalable wavelet-based coding of irregular meshes with interactive region-of-interest support

This paper proposes a novel functionality in wavelet-based irregular mesh coding, which is interactive region-of-interest (ROI) support. The proposed approach enables the user to define the arbitrary ROIs at the decoder side and to prioritize and decode these regions at arbitrarily high-granularity levels. In this context, a novel adaptive wavelet transform for irregular meshes is proposed, which enables: 1) varying the resolution across the surface at arbitrarily fine-granularity levels and 2) dynamic tiling, which adapts the tile sizes to the local sampling densities at each resolution level. The proposed tiling approach enables a rate-distortion-optimal distribution of rate across spatial regions. When limiting the highest resolution ROI to the visible regions, the fine granularity of the proposed adaptive wavelet transform reduces the required amount of graphics memory by up to 50%. Furthermore, the required graphics memory for an arbitrary small ROI becomes negligible compared to rendering without ROI support, independent of any tiling decisions. Random access is provided by a novel dynamic tiling approach, which proves to be particularly beneficial for large models of over 10(6) similar to 10(7) vertices. The experiments show that the dynamic tiling introduces a limited lossless rate penalty compared to an equivalent codec without ROI support. Additionally, rate savings up to 85% are observed while decoding ROIs of tens of thousands of vertices

Cross-layer optimization of unequal protected layered video over hierarchical modulation

Abstract-unequal protection mechanisms have been proposed at several layers in order to improve the reliability of multimedia contents, especially for video data. The paper aims at implementing a multi-layer unequal protection scheme, which is based on a Physical-Transport-Application cross-layer design. Hierarchical modulation, in the physical layer, has been demonstrated to increase the overall user capacity of a wireless communications. On the other hand, unequal erasure protection codes at the transport layer turned out to be an efficient method to protect video data generated by the application layer by exploiting their intrinsic properties. In this paper, the two techniques are jointly optimized in order to enable recovering lost data in case the protection is performed separately. We show that the cross-layer design proposed herein outperforms the performance of hierarchical modulation and unequal erasure codes taken independently