Investigating low-bitrate, low-complexity H.264 region of interest techniques in error-prone environments

The H.264/AVC video coding standard leverages advanced compression methods to provide a significant increase in performance over previous CODECs in terms of picture quality, bitrate, and flexibility. The specification itself provides several profiles and levels that allow customization through the use of various advanced features. In addition to these features, several new video coding techniques have been developed since the standard\u27s inception. One such technique known as Region of Interest (RoI) coding has been in existence since before H.264\u27s formalization, and several means of implementing RoI coding in H.264 have been proposed. Region of Interest coding operates under the assumption that one or more regions of a sequence have higher priority than the rest of the video. One goal of RoI coding is to provide a decrease in bitrate without significant loss of perceptual quality, and this is particularly applicable to low complexity environments, if the proper implementation is used. Furthermore, RoI coding may allow for enhanced error resilience in the selected regions if desired, making RoI suitable for both low-bitrate and error-prone scenarios. The goal of this thesis project was to examine H.264 Region of Interest coding as it applies to such scenarios. A modified version of the H.264 JM Reference Software was created in which all non-Baseline profile features were removed. Six low-complexity RoI coding techniques, three targeting rate control and three targeting error resilience, were selected for implementation. Error and distortion modeling tools were created to enhance the quality of experimental data. Results were gathered by varying a range of coding parameters including frame size, target bitrate, and macroblock error rates. Methods were then examined based on their rate-distortion curves, ability to achieve target bitrates accurately, and per-region distortions where applicable

Error resilient H.264 coded video transmission over wireless channels

The H.264/AVC recommendation was first published in 2003 and builds on the concepts of earlier standards such as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. The H.264 recommendation represents an evolution of the existing video coding standards and was developed in response to the growing need for higher compression. Even though H.264 provides for greater compression, H.264 compressed video streams are very prone to channel errors in mobile wireless fading channels such as 3G due to high error rates experienced. Common video compression techniques include motion compensation, prediction methods, transformation, quantization and entropy coding, which are the common elements of a hybrid video codecs. The ITU-T recommendation H.264 introduces several new error resilience tools, as well as several new features such as Intra Prediction and Deblocking Filter. The channel model used for the testing was the Rayleigh Fading channel with the noise component simulated as Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) using QPSK as the modulation technique. The channel was used over several Eb/N0 values to provide similar bit error rates as those found in the literature. Though further research needs to be conducted, results have shown that when using the H.264 error resilience tools in protecting encoded bitstreams to minor channel errors improvement in the decoded video quality can be observed. The tools did not perform as well with mild and severe channel errors significant as the resultant bitstream was too corrupted. From this, further research in channel coding techniques is needed to determine if the bitstream can be protected from these sorts of error rate

Towards a low complexity scheme for medical images in scalable video coding

Medical imaging has become of vital importance for diagnosing diseases and conducting noninvasive procedures. Advances in eHealth applications are challenged by the fact that Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) requires high-resolution images, thereby increasing their size and the associated computational complexity, particularly when these images are communicated over IP and wireless networks. Therefore, medical research requires an efficient coding technique to achieve high-quality and low-complexity images with error-resilient features. In this study, we propose an improved coding scheme that exploits the content features of encoded videos with low complexity combined with flexible macroblock ordering for error resilience. We identify the homogeneous region in which the search for optimal macroblock modes is early terminated. For non-homogeneous regions, the integration of smaller blocks is employed only if the vector difference is less than the threshold. Results confirm that the proposed technique achieves a considerable performance improvement compared with existing schemes in terms of reducing the computational complexity without compromising the bit-rate and peak signal-to-noise ratio. © 2013 IEEE

Resilient Digital Video Transmission over Wireless Channels using Pixel-Level Artefact Detection Mechanisms

Recent advances in communications and video coding technology have brought multimedia communications into everyday life, where a variety of services and applications are being integrated within different devices such that multimedia content is provided everywhere and on any device. H.264/AVC provides a major advance on preceding video coding standards obtaining as much as twice the coding efficiency over these standards (Richardson I.E.G., 2003, Wiegand T. & Sullivan G.J., 2007). Furthermore, this new codec inserts video related information within network abstraction layer units (NALUs), which facilitates the transmission of H.264/AVC coded sequences over a variety of network environments (Stockhammer, T. & Hannuksela M.M., 2005) making it applicable for a broad range of applications such as TV broadcasting, mobile TV, video-on-demand, digital media storage, high definition TV, multimedia streaming and conversational applications. Real-time wireless conversational and broadcast applications are particularly challenging as, in general, reliable delivery cannot be guaranteed (Stockhammer, T. & Hannuksela M.M., 2005). The H.264/AVC standard specifies several error resilient strategies to minimise the effect of transmission errors on the perceptual quality of the reconstructed video sequences. However, these methods assume a packet-loss scenario where the receiver discards and conceals all the video information contained within a corrupted NALU packet. This implies that the error resilient methods adopted by the standard operate at a lower bound since not all the information contained within a corrupted NALU packet is un-utilizable (Stockhammer, T. et al., 2003).peer-reviewe

Flexible Macroblock Ordering for Context-Aware Ultrasound Video Transmission over Mobile WiMAX

The most recent network technologies are enabling a variety of new applications, thanks to the provision of increased bandwidth and better management of Quality of Service. Nevertheless, telemedical services involving multimedia data are still lagging behind, due to the concern of the end users, that is, clinicians and also patients, about the low quality provided. Indeed, emerging network technologies should be appropriately exploited by designing the transmission strategy focusing on quality provision for end users. Stemming from this principle, we propose here a context-aware transmission strategy for medical video transmission over WiMAX systems. Context, in terms of regions of interest (ROI) in a specific session, is taken into account for the identification of multiple regions of interest, and compression/transmission strategies are tailored to such context information. We present a methodology based on H.264 medical video compression and Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO) for ROI identification. Two different unequal error protection methodologies, providing higher protection to the most diagnostically relevant data, are presented

Analysis and design of efficient techniques for video transmission in IEEE 802.11 wireless ad hoc networks

[EN] Wireless mobile ad ho networks, also known as MANETs, are omposed by independent mobile stations that ommuni ate without requiring any sort of infrastru ture for support. These networks are hara terized by variable bandwidth values and frequent path breaks, whi h are due to hannel noise, interferen e between stations and mobility. Su h fa tors require significant adaptation apabilites at different levels of the proto ol suites employed, enabling stations to qui kly respond to fast- hanging network onditions. Resear h on the most adequate proto- ols for the physi al, MAC and routing layers is still on-going, though some basi onsensus has already been rea hed and several testbeds have been setup around the world. To deploy real-time multimedia servi es, namely voi e and video, on top of su h an unreliable network environment is a very hallenging task. In this thesis we propose to a hieve that goal starting from urrently available Wi-Fi te hnology, and gradually finding the most adequate enhan ements to ea h proto ol layer of interest; we then ombine these enhan ements until we a hieve a omplete QoS framework for ad ho networks. By using urrently available te hnology we assure that the proposal of this thesis has an inherent high-level of appli ability on real life environments. Sin e our working field fo uses on video transmission over wireless ad ho networks, we will show how it is possible to support several QoS- onstrained video streams in MANET environments hara terized by moderate to high mobility levels, and by a significant amount of best efort traffic[ES] Las redes inalámbricas ad hoc, también conocidas como redes MANET, están compuestas por un conjunto de estaciones móviles independientes capaces de omunicarse entre sí sin necesidad de ningún tipo de infraestructura común de comunicaciones. Estas redes se caracterizan por tener un ancho de banda variable y pérdidas frecuentes de ruta que se pueden atribuir al ruido del anal inalámbrico, a la interferencia entre las estaciones móviles o bien a la movilidad de las estaciones. Dichos factores requieren una gran capacidad de adaptación en las diferentes capas de la arquitectura de protocolos, permitiendo a una estación responder rápidamente a posibles cambios bruscos en las condiciones de la red. A pesar de que aún se están realizando trabajos de investigación en bus a de los protocolos más adecuados para las capas físicas, a eso al medio (MAC) y encaminamiento, ha sido posible llegar a un nivel básico de consenso, lo cual ha permitido el despliegue de plataformas y entornos aplicados que utilizan tecnología de red MANET. Ofrecer servicios multimedia, como voz y vídeo, en redes con tan poca habilidad es un desafío importante. En esta tesis nos proponemos alcanzar este objetivo partiendo de la tecnología Wi-Fi actualmente disponible, encontrando de forma paulatina las mejoras más importantes en las diferentes capas de la arquitectura de red, para llegar, finalmente, a una solución integrada capaz de ofrecer calidad de servicio (QoS) en las redes MANET. Al utilizar la tecnología que disponemos actualmente nos aseguramos que las propuestas de esta tesis tengan un alto grado de aplicabilidad en entornos reales. Ya que la línea de trabajo de la tesis está aplicada a la transmisión de vídeo en redes MANET, demostraremos que es posible ofrecer calidad de servicio a varios flujos de vídeo en una red MANET caracterizada por altos grados de movilidad en sus nodos y un nivel significativo de tráfico o de tipo best effortTavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM. (2006). Analysis and design of efficient techniques for video transmission in IEEE 802.11 wireless ad hoc networks [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/135282TESI

A hybrid error control and artifact detection mechanism for robust decoding of H.264/AVC video sequences

This letter presents a hybrid error control and artifact detection (HECAD) mechanism which can be used to enhance the error resilient capabilities of the standard H.264/advanced video coding (AVC) codec. The proposed solution first exploits the residual source redundancy to recover the most likelihood H.264/AVC bitstream. If error recovery is unsuccessful, the residual corrupted slices are then passed through a pixel-level artifact detection mechanism to detect the visually impaired macroblocks to be concealed. The proposed HECAD algorithm achieves overall peak signal-to-noise ratio gains between 0.4 dB and 4.5 dB relative to the standard with no additional bandwidth requirement. The cost of this solution translates in a marginal increase in the complexity of the decoder. In addition, this method can be applied in conjunction with other error resilient strategies and scales well with different encoding configurations.peer-reviewe