Transcoding of MPEG Bitstreams

This paper discusses the problem of transcoding as it may occur in, for instance, the following situation. Suppose a satellite transmits an MPEG-compressed video signal at say 9 Mbit/s. This signal must be relayed at a cable head end. However, since the cable capacity is only limited, the cable head end will want to relay this incoming signal at a lower bit-rate of, say, 5 Mbit/s. The problem is how to convert a compressed video signal of a given bit-rate into a compressed video signal of a lower bit-rate. The specific transcoding problem discussed in this paper is referred to as bit-rate conversion. Basically, a transcoder used for such a purpose will consist of a cascaded decoder and encoder. It is shown in the paper that the complexity of this combination can be significantly reduced. The paper also investigates the loss of picture quality that may be expected when a transcoder is in the transmission chain. The loss of quality as compared to that resulting in the case of transmission without a transcoder is studied by means of computations using simplified models of the transmission chains and by means of using computer simulations of the complete transmission chain. It will be shown that the presence of two quantizers, i.e. cascaded quantization, in the transmission chain is the main cause of extra losses, and it will be shown that the losses in terms of SNR will be some 0.5 ¿ 1.0 dB greater than in the case of a transmission chain without a transcoder

A two-stage video coding framework with both self-adaptive redundant dictionary and adaptively orthonormalized DCT basis

In this work, we propose a two-stage video coding framework, as an extension of our previous one-stage framework in [1]. The two-stage frameworks consists two different dictionaries. Specifically, the first stage directly finds the sparse representation of a block with a self-adaptive dictionary consisting of all possible inter-prediction candidates by solving an L0-norm minimization problem using an improved orthogonal matching pursuit with embedded orthonormalization (eOMP) algorithm, and the second stage codes the residual using DCT dictionary adaptively orthonormalized to the subspace spanned by the first stage atoms. The transition of the first stage and the second stage is determined based on both stages' quantization stepsizes and a threshold. We further propose a complete context adaptive entropy coder to efficiently code the locations and the coefficients of chosen first stage atoms. Simulation results show that the proposed coder significantly improves the RD performance over our previous one-stage coder. More importantly, the two-stage coder, using a fixed block size and inter-prediction only, outperforms the H.264 coder (x264) and is competitive with the HEVC reference coder (HM) over a large rate range

Distributed video coding for wireless video sensor networks: a review of the state-of-the-art architectures

Distributed video coding (DVC) is a relatively new video coding architecture originated from two fundamental theorems namely, Slepian–Wolf and Wyner–Ziv. Recent research developments have made DVC attractive for applications in the emerging domain of wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs). This paper reviews the state-of-the-art DVC architectures with a focus on understanding their opportunities and gaps in addressing the operational requirements and application needs of WVSNs

Fast intra prediction in the transform domain

In this paper, we present a fast intra prediction method based on separating the transformed coefficients. The prediction block can be obtained from the transformed and quantized neighboring block generating minimum distortion for each DC and AC coefficients independently. Two prediction methods are proposed, one is full block search prediction (FBSP) and the other is edge based distance prediction (EBDP), that find the best matched transformed coefficients on additional neighboring blocks. Experimental results show that the use of transform coefficients greatly enhances the efficiency of intra prediction whilst keeping complexity low compared to H.264/AVC

Steerable Discrete Cosine Transform

In image compression, classical block-based separable transforms tend to be inefficient when image blocks contain arbitrarily shaped discontinuities. For this reason, transforms incorporating directional information are an appealing alternative. In this paper, we propose a new approach to this problem, namely a discrete cosine transform (DCT) that can be steered in any chosen direction. Such transform, called steerable DCT (SDCT), allows to rotate in a flexible way pairs of basis vectors, and enables precise matching of directionality in each image block, achieving improved coding efficiency. The optimal rotation angles for SDCT can be represented as solution of a suitable rate-distortion (RD) problem. We propose iterative methods to search such solution, and we develop a fully fledged image encoder to practically compare our techniques with other competing transforms. Analytical and numerical results prove that SDCT outperforms both DCT and state-of-the-art directional transforms

Localized temporal decorrelation for video compression

Many of the current video compression algorithms perform analysis and coding operations in a block-wise manner. Most of them use a motion compensated DCT algorithm as the basis. Many other codecs, mostly academic and in their infancy and known as Second Generation techniques, utilize region and contour based and model based techniques. Unfortunately, these second-generation methods have not been successful in gaining widespread acceptance in both the standards and the consumer world. Many of them require specialized computationally intensive software and/or hardware. Due to these shortcomings, current block based methods have been finetuned to get better performance at even very low bit rates (sub 64 kbps). Block based motion estimation is the principal mechanism used to compensate for motion between frames in an image sequence. Although current algorithms are fast and quite effective, they fail in compensating for uncovered background areas in a frame. Solutions such as hierarchical motion estimation schemes do not work very well since there is no reference in past, and in some cases, future frames for an uncovered background resulting in the block being transmitted as an intra frame (which requires the most bandwidth among all type of blocks). This thesis intro duces an intermediate stage, which compensates for these isolated uncovered areas. The intermediate stage uses a localized decorrelation technique to reduce frame to frame temporal redundancies. The algorithm can be easily incorporated into exist ing systems to achieve an even better performance and can be easily extended as a scalable video coding architecture. Experimental results show that the algorithm, used in conjunction with motion estimation, is quite effective in reducing temporal redundancies

An FPGA Implementation of HW/SW Codesign Architecture for H.263 Video Coding

Chapitre 12 http://www.intechopen.com/download/pdf/pdfs_id/1574