Research and developments of Dirac video codec

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University.In digital video compression, apart from storage, successful transmission of the compressed video data over the bandwidth limited erroneous channels is another important issue. To enable a video codec for broadcasting application, it is required to implement the corresponding coding tools (e.g. error-resilient coding, rate control etc.). They are normally non-normative parts of a video codec and hence their specifications are not defined in the standard. In Dirac as well, the original codec is optimized for storage purpose only and so, several non-normative part of the encoding tools are still required in order to be able to use in other types of application. Being the "Research and Developments of the Dirac Video Codec" as the research title, phase I of the project is mainly focused on the error-resilient transmission over a noisy channel. The error-resilient coding method used here is a simple and low complex coding scheme which provides the error-resilient transmission of the compressed video bitstream of Dirac video encoder over the packet erasure wired network. The scheme combines source and channel coding approach where error-resilient source coding is achieved by data partitioning in the wavelet transformed domain and channel coding is achieved through the application of either Rate-Compatible Punctured Convolutional (RCPC) Code or Turbo Code (TC) using un-equal error protection between header plus MV and data. The scheme is designed mainly for the packet-erasure channel, i.e. targeted for the Internet broadcasting application. But, for a bandwidth limited channel, it is still required to limit the amount of bits generated from the encoder depending on the available bandwidth in addition to the error-resilient coding. So, in the 2nd phase of the project, a rate control algorithm is presented. The algorithm is based upon the Quality Factor (QF) optimization method where QF of the encoded video is adaptively changing in order to achieve average bitrate which is constant over each Group of Picture (GOP). A relation between the bitrate, R and the QF, which is called Rate-QF (R-QF) model is derived in order to estimate the optimum QF of the current encoding frame for a given target bitrate, R. In some applications like video conferencing, real-time encoding and decoding with minimum delay is crucial, but, the ability to do real-time encoding/decoding is largely determined by the complexity of the encoder/decoder. As we all know that motion estimation process inside the encoder is the most time consuming stage. So, reducing the complexity of the motion estimation stage will certainly give one step closer to the real-time application. So, as a partial contribution toward realtime application, in the final phase of the research, a fast Motion Estimation (ME) strategy is designed and implemented. It is the combination of modified adaptive search plus semi-hierarchical way of motion estimation. The same strategy was implemented in both Dirac and H.264 in order to investigate its performance on different codecs. Together with this fast ME strategy, a method which is called partial cost function calculation in order to further reduce down the computational load of the cost function calculation was presented. The calculation is based upon the pre-defined set of patterns which were chosen in such a way that they have as much maximum coverage as possible over the whole block. In summary, this research work has contributed to the error-resilient transmission of compressed bitstreams of Dirac video encoder over a bandwidth limited error prone channel. In addition to this, the final phase of the research has partially contributed toward the real-time application of the Dirac video codec by implementing a fast motion estimation strategy together with partial cost function calculation idea.BBC R&D and Brunel University

On Development of Some Soft Computing Based Multiuser Detection Techniques for SDMA–OFDM Wireless Communication System

Space Division Multiple Access(SDMA) based technique as a subclass of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems achieves high spectral efficiency through bandwidth reuse by multiple users. On the other hand, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) mitigates the impairments of the propagation channel. The combination of SDMA and OFDM has emerged as a most competitive technology for future wireless communication system. In the SDMA uplink, multiple users communicate simultaneously with a multiple antenna Base Station (BS) sharing the same frequency band by exploring their unique user specific-special spatial signature. Different Multiuser Detection (MUD) schemes have been proposed at the BS receiver to identify users correctly by mitigating the multiuser interference. However, most of the classical MUDs fail to separate the users signals in the over load scenario, where the number of users exceed the number of receiving antennas. On the other hand, due to exhaustive search mechanism, the optimal Maximum Likelihood (ML) detector is limited by high computational complexity, which increases exponentially with increasing number of simultaneous users. Hence, cost function minimization based Minimum Error Rate (MER) detectors are preferred, which basically minimize the probability of error by iteratively updating receiver’s weights using adaptive algorithms such as Steepest Descent (SD), Conjugate Gradient (CG) etc. The first part of research proposes Optimization Techniques (OTs) aided MER detectors to overcome the shortfalls of the CG based MER detectors. Popular metaheuristic search algorithms like Adaptive Genetic Algorithm (AGA), Adaptive Differential Evolution Algorithm (ADEA) and Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO), which rely on an intelligent search of a large but finite solution space using statistical methods, have been applied for finding the optimal weight vectors for MER MUD. Further, it is observed in an overload SDMA–OFDM system that the channel output phasor constellation often becomes linearly non-separable. With increasing the number of users, the receiver weight optimization task turns out to be more difficult due to the exponentially increased number of dimensions of the weight matrix. As a result, MUD becomes a challenging multidimensional optimization problem. Therefore, signal classification requires a nonlinear solution. Considering this, the second part of research work suggests Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based MUDs on thestandard Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Radial Basis Function (RBF) frameworks fo

Unequally protected SPIHT video codec for low bit rate transmission over highly error-prone mobile channels

The three-dimensional set partitioning in hierarchical trees (3D-SPIHT) wavelet-based codec is presented for robust mobile transmission of low bit rate video data under severe channel conditions. The error resilience of the codec is improved by the insertion of synchronisation points in the compressed bitstream. The scalable bitstream is amenable to unequal error protection (UEP) and a non-uniform channel coding scheme is presented for the efficient protection of the data. The main advantage of the 3D-SPIHT is its robustness to errors in severely error-prone environments. The standard H.263, employing Annexes D, F and G, synchronisation points and an additional error-resilience technique, is used for a comparative performance with 3D-SPIHT. A UEP channel coding scheme is also presented for H.263. Results are obtained for the globally protected and the unequally protected compressed video streams after transmission over the TETRA PMR channel