Wireless Mesh Networks to Support Video Surveillance: Architecture, Protocol, and Implementation Issues

Current video-surveillance systems typically consist of many video sources distributed over a wide area, transmitting live video streams to a central location for processing and monitoring. The target of this paper is to present an experience of implementation of a large-scale video-surveillance system based on a wireless mesh network infrastructure, discussing architecture, protocol, and implementation issues. More specifically, the paper proposes an architecture for a video-surveillance system, and mainly centers its focus on the routing protocol to be used in the wireless mesh network, evaluating its impact on performance at the receiver side. A wireless mesh network was chosen to support a video-surveillance application in order to reduce the overall system costs and increase scalability and performance. The paper analyzes the performance of the network in order to choose design parameters that will achieve the best trade-off between video encoding quality and the network traffic generated

Enhancing the error detection capabilities of DCT based codecs using compressed domain dissimilarity metrics

Video compression standards are implemented in wireless data transmission technologies to provide multimedia services efficiently. These compression standards generally utilize the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) in conjunction with variable length codes (VLC) in order to achieve the required high compression ratios. While providing the necessary high data rates, this technique has the disadvantage of making the system more susceptible to transmission errors. The standard decoders do not manage to detect a large number of corrupted macroblocks, 40.54% not detected for H.263+, contributing to a significant reduction in the end-to-end video quality as perceived by the end-user. This paper presents three dissimilarity metrics which contain both color and texture information and that can be extracted directly from the compressed DCT coefficients. These metrics can be used to enhance the error-detection capabilities of standard DCT based codecs. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm increases the error detection rate by 54.06% with a gain in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 3.21 dB. This improvement in performance is superior to other solutions found in literature.peer-reviewe

A Subband Coding Method for HDTV

This paper introduces a new HDTV coder based on motion compensation, subband coding, and high order conditional entropy coding. The proposed coder exploits the temporal and spatial statistical dependencies inherent in the HDTV signal by using intra- and inter-subband conditioning for coding both the motion coordinates and the residual signal. The new framework provides an easy way to control the system complexity and performance, and inherently supports multiresolution transmission. Experimental results show that the coder outperforms MPEG-2, while still maintaining relatively low complexity

Coherent video reconstruction with motion estimation at the decoder

In traditional predictive video coding the block matching is performed at the encoder. The obtained motion field is then transmitted to the decoder, together with the prediction residue. Nevertheless, if the motion field is not provided it can be reconstructed, as long as the decoder manages to exploit some correlated information. This paper presents an algorithm for the motion estimation at the decoder side, given the prediction residue only. The main novelty of this algorithm relies on the contextual reconstruction of a frame region composed of several blocks. Simulation results show that taking into account a whole row can improve significantly the results obtained with an algorithm that reconstructs each block separately