Motion estimation and CABAC VLSI co-processors for real-time high-quality H.264/AVC video coding

Real-time and high-quality video coding is gaining a wide interest in the research and industrial community for different applications. H.264/AVC, a recent standard for high performance video coding, can be successfully exploited in several scenarios including digital video broadcasting, high-definition TV and DVD-based systems, which require to sustain up to tens of Mbits/s. To that purpose this paper proposes optimized architectures for H.264/AVC most critical tasks, Motion estimation and context adaptive binary arithmetic coding. Post synthesis results on sub-micron CMOS standard-cells technologies show that the proposed architectures can actually process in real-time 720 × 480 video sequences at 30 frames/s and grant more than 50 Mbits/s. The achieved circuit complexity and power consumption budgets are suitable for their integration in complex VLSI multimedia systems based either on AHB bus centric on-chip communication system or on novel Network-on-Chip (NoC) infrastructures for MPSoC (Multi-Processor System on Chip

Region of interest-based adaptive multimedia streaming scheme

Adaptive multimedia streaming aims at adjusting the transmitted content based on the available bandwidth such as losses that often severely affect the end-user perceived quality are minimized and consequently the transmission quality increases. Current solutions affect equally the whole viewing area of the multimedia frames, despite research showing that there are regions on which the viewers are more interested in than on others. This paper presents a novel region of interest-based adaptive scheme (ROIAS) for multimedia streaming that when performing transmission-related quality adjustments, selectively affects the quality of those regions of the image the viewers are the least interested in. As the quality of the regions the viewers are the most interested in will not change (or will involve little change),the proposed scheme provides higher overall end-user perceived quality than any of the existing adaptive solutions

MASCOT : metadata for advanced scalable video coding tools : final report

The goal of the MASCOT project was to develop new video coding schemes and tools that provide both an increased coding efficiency as well as extended scalability features compared to technology that was available at the beginning of the project. Towards that goal the following tools would be used: - metadata-based coding tools; - new spatiotemporal decompositions; - new prediction schemes. Although the initial goal was to develop one single codec architecture that was able to combine all new coding tools that were foreseen when the project was formulated, it became clear that this would limit the selection of the new tools. Therefore the consortium decided to develop two codec frameworks within the project, a standard hybrid DCT-based codec and a 3D wavelet-based codec, which together are able to accommodate all tools developed during the course of the project

WAVELET-DCT BASED IMAGE CODER FOR VIDEO CODING APPLICATIONS

This project is about the implementation ofWavelet-DCT intra-frame coder for video coding applications. Wavelet-DCT is a novel algorithm that uses Forward Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to compute DCT. It is proved that the algorithm has better compression performance for difference images compared to conventional DCT. This is possible since the algorithm allows discarding insignificant DWT coefficients or more popularly known thresholding the DWT coefficients while computing the DCT. In video coder applications, wavelet-DCT is capable to achieve greater compression. This project is a feasibility study on the performance ofWavelet-DCT in video coder applications. ASIMULINK model for conventional intra-frame coder is developed and tested, with very significant data bit reduction achieved. Then, the conventional DCT block has been replaced with a Wavelet-DCT block. In the study, on one hand, experiment is conducted on difference image for conventional intra-frame coder; on the other, the same difference image with Wavelet-DCT based intra-frame coder. The thresholding algorithm is used to remove some ofthe insignificant DWT coefficients from the difference image. The main objective is to achieve a better compression capability for difference image within video coding applications. The project's experimental results supports our claim that implementation ofWavelet-DCT in intraframe coder within a video coding application could improve the system's performance with a greater compression ratio at the same Mean Squared Error

Machine Learning for Multimedia Communications

Machine learning is revolutionizing the way multimedia information is processed and transmitted to users. After intensive and powerful training, some impressive efficiency/accuracy improvements have been made all over the transmission pipeline. For example, the high model capacity of the learning-based architectures enables us to accurately model the image and video behavior such that tremendous compression gains can be achieved. Similarly, error concealment, streaming strategy or even user perception modeling have widely benefited from the recent learningoriented developments. However, learning-based algorithms often imply drastic changes to the way data are represented or consumed, meaning that the overall pipeline can be affected even though a subpart of it is optimized. In this paper, we review the recent major advances that have been proposed all across the transmission chain, and we discuss their potential impact and the research challenges that they raise

DISTRIBUTED PARALLEL COMPUTATION IN VIDEO CODING USING WORKSTATIONS

In this paper a new approach for coding moving pictures is presented. Because of the large number of calculations, the conventional solution uses tightly coupled multiproces- sors working in parallel to achieve real-time processing (encoding 25 - 30 pictures per second). A new idea is to distribute the workload among workstations connected to a network where a software package (e.g. PVM - Parallel Virtual Machine) supports the communication between the machines. In contrast with the present hard wired structures, this loosely coupled system provides more flexibility in coding algorithms and has better cost/performance. The paper describes the main parallel structures already used in video processing, and discusses the possibility of mapping them to this new paralell system. Also. simulations were carried out to examine the performance of the most computation- ally intensive operations (DCT - Discrete Cosine Transform and motion estimation). The tests were performed on a cluster of SUN Sparc 2s connected via Ethernel. It was experienced that DCT did not show any speed-up because of the extremely low CC ra- tio. However, motion estimation worked well if either a full or hierarchical search was used. This research work was carried out in 1994 at the Information Theory Group of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Delft