Advanced Telecommunications and Signal Processing Program

Contains an introduction, and reports on seven research projects.Advanced Telecommunications Research ProgramAT&T FellowshipINTEL FellowshipU.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research NDSEG Graduate FellowshipMaryland Procurement Office Contract MDA904-93-C-418

Advanced Television and Signal Processing Program

Contains an introduction and reports on two research projects.Advanced Television Research Progra

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

Enabling error-resilient internet broadcasting using motion compensated spatial partitioning and packet FEC for the dirac video codec

Video transmission over the wireless or wired network require protection from channel errors since compressed video bitstreams are very sensitive to transmission errors because of the use of predictive coding and variable length coding. In this paper, a simple, low complexity and patent free error-resilient coding is proposed. It is based upon the idea of using spatial partitioning on the motion compensated residual frame without employing the transform coefficient coding. The proposed scheme is intended for open source Dirac video codec in order to enable the codec to be used for Internet broadcasting. By partitioning the wavelet transform coefficients of the motion compensated residual frame into groups and independently processing each group using arithmetic coding and Forward Error Correction (FEC), robustness to transmission errors over the packet erasure wired network could be achieved. Using the Rate Compatibles Punctured Code (RCPC) and Turbo Code (TC) as the FEC, the proposed technique provides gracefully decreasing perceptual quality over packet loss rates up to 30%. The PSNR performance is much better when compared with the conventional data partitioning only methods. Simulation results show that the use of multiple partitioning of wavelet coefficient in Dirac can achieve up to 8 dB PSNR gain over its existing un-partitioned method

Robust Transmission of Images Based on JPEG2000 Using Edge Information

In multimedia communication and data storage, compression of data is essential to speed up the transmission rate, minimize the use of channel bandwidth, and minimize storage space. JPEG2000 is the new standard for image compression for transmission and storage. The drawback of Compression is that compressed data are more vulnerable to channel noise during transmission. Previous techniques for error concealment are classified into three groups depending on the Approach employed by the encoder and decoder: Forward Error Concealment, Error Concealment by Post Processing and Interactive Error Concealment. The objective of this thesis is to develop a Concealment methodology that has the capability of both error detection and concealment, be Compatible with the JPEG2000 standard, and guarantees minimum use of channel bandwidth. A new methodology is developed to detect corrupted regions/coefficients in the received Images the edge information. The methodology requires transmission of edge information of wavelet coefficients of the original image along with JPEG2000 compressed image. At the receiver, the edge information of received wavelet coefficients is computed and compared with the received edge information of the original image to determine the corrupted coefficients. Three methods of concealment, each including a filter, are investigated to handle the corrupted regions/coefficients. MATLAB™ functions are developed that simulate channel noise, image transmission Using JPEG2000 standard and the proposed methodology. The objective quality measure such as Peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), root-mean-square error (rms) and subjective quality Measure are used to evaluate processed images. The simulation results are presented to demonstrate The performance of the proposed methodology. The results are also compared with recent approaches Found in the literature. Based on performance of the proposed approach, it is claimed that the Proposed approach can be successfully used in wireless and Internet communications

Advanced Telecommunications and Signal Processing Program

Contains an introduction and reports on eleven research projects.Advanced Telecommunications Research Progra

Motion compensation and very low bit rate video coding

Recently, many activities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Standard Organization (ISO) are leading to define new standards for very low bit-rate video coding, such as H.263 and MPEG-4 after successful applications of the international standards H.261 and MPEG-1/2 for video coding above 64kbps. However, at very low bit-rate the classic block matching based DCT video coding scheme suffers seriously from blocking artifacts which degrade the quality of reconstructed video frames considerably. To solve this problem, a new technique in which motion compensation is based on dense motion field is presented in this dissertation. Four efficient new video coding algorithms based on this new technique for very low bit-rate are proposed. (1) After studying model-based video coding algorithms, we propose an optical flow based video coding algorithm with thresh-olding techniques. A statistic model is established for distribution of intensity difference between two successive frames, and four thresholds are used to control the bit-rate and the quality of reconstructed frames. It outperforms the typical model-based techniques in terms of complexity and quality of reconstructed frames. (2) An efficient algorithm using DCT coded optical flow. It is found that dense motion fields can be modeled as the first order auto-regressive model, and efficiently compressed with DCT technique, hence achieving very low bit-rate and higher visual quality than the H.263/TMN5. (3) A region-based discrete wavelet transform video coding algorithm. This algorithm implements dense motion field and regions are segmented according to their content significance. The DWT is applied to residual images region by region, and bits are adaptively allocated to regions. It improves the visual quality and PSNR of significant regions while maintaining low bit-rate. (4) A segmentation-based video coding algorithm for stereo sequence. A correlation-feedback algorithm with Kalman filter is utilized to improve the accuracy of optical flow fields. Three criteria, which are associated with 3-D information, 2-D connectivity and motion vector fields, respectively, are defined for object segmentation. A chain code is utilized to code the shapes of the segmented objects. it can achieve very high compression ratio up to several thousands