Error-resilient performance of Dirac video codec over packet-erasure channel

Video transmission over the wireless or wired network requires error-resilient mechanism since compressed video bitstreams are sensitive to transmission errors because of the use of predictive coding and variable length coding. This paper investigates the performance of a simple and low complexity error-resilient coding scheme which combines source and channel coding to protect compressed bitstream of wavelet-based Dirac video codec in the packet-erasure channel. By partitioning the wavelet transform coefficients of the motion-compensated residual frame into groups and independently processing each group using arithmetic and Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding, Dirac could achieves the robustness to transmission errors by giving the video quality which is gracefully decreasing over a range of packet loss rates up to 30% when compared with conventional FEC only methods. Simulation results also show that the proposed scheme using multiple partitions can achieve up to 10 dB PSNR gain over its existing un-partitioned format. This paper also investigates the error-resilient performance of the proposed scheme in comparison with H.264 over packet-erasure channel

Parsing a sequence of qubits

We develop a theoretical framework for frame synchronization, also known as block synchronization, in the quantum domain which makes it possible to attach classical and quantum metadata to quantum information over a noisy channel even when the information source and sink are frame-wise asynchronous. This eliminates the need of frame synchronization at the hardware level and allows for parsing qubit sequences during quantum information processing. Our framework exploits binary constant-weight codes that are self-synchronizing. Possible applications may include asynchronous quantum communication such as a self-synchronizing quantum network where one can hop into the channel at any time, catch the next coming quantum information with a label indicating the sender, and reply by routing her quantum information with control qubits for quantum switches all without assuming prior frame synchronization between users.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Final accepted version for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Edit Distance: Sketching, Streaming and Document Exchange

We show that in the document exchange problem, where Alice holds $x \in \{0,1\}^n$ and Bob holds $y \in \{0,1\}^n$, Alice can send Bob a message of size $O(K(\log^2 K+\log n))$ bits such that Bob can recover $x$ using the message and his input $y$ if the edit distance between $x$ and $y$ is no more than $K$, and output "error" otherwise. Both the encoding and decoding can be done in time $\tilde{O}(n+\mathsf{poly}(K))$. This result significantly improves the previous communication bounds under polynomial encoding/decoding time. We also show that in the referee model, where Alice and Bob hold $x$ and $y$ respectively, they can compute sketches of $x$ and $y$ of sizes $\mathsf{poly}(K \log n)$ bits (the encoding), and send to the referee, who can then compute the edit distance between $x$ and $y$ together with all the edit operations if the edit distance is no more than $K$, and output "error" otherwise (the decoding). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result for sketching edit distance using $\mathsf{poly}(K \log n)$ bits. Moreover, the encoding phase of our sketching algorithm can be performed by scanning the input string in one pass. Thus our sketching algorithm also implies the first streaming algorithm for computing edit distance and all the edits exactly using $\mathsf{poly}(K \log n)$ bits of space.Comment: Full version of an article to be presented at the 57th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2016