Bauwelinck, Johan

Van Praet, Christophe

Vandewege, Jan

English

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

Dedicated H.264/MPEG4 intra 4x4 encoder fornetwork video processingChristophe Van PraetDepartment of Information Technology, Ghent UniversitySupervisor(s): Jan Vandewege, Johan BauwelinckOver the past few years, the internet has changed significantly to offer more than WWW, emailand simple file transfers, ”classic” services let’s say. The internet now combines all commoncommunication services, ranging from email, radio broadcasts, phone calls to teleworking, gaming,video exchanging and even HD video broadcasting (IPTV) and tele-conferencing into a single,massive IP-network. The video aspect generates so much traffic, it has become one of the majormotivations for research to keep pushing the boundaries further and further, and provide ever-increasing bit rates to the bandwidth-hungry users.As the internet has evolved beyond anyone’s expectations, not all arising requirements can bemet by merely offering increased bit rates (physical layer) and changes on higher layers are re-quired, such as e.g Quality of Service (QoS). Video transmission remains particularly challengingand demands very high compression to result in manageable bit-rates.Combining high compression with a high quality of experience requires complex encoding/de-coding algorithms (CODEC), usually H.264/MPEG4 in TV over internet (IPTV). Hence, IPTVusers need a Set-Top Box (STB) to decode the incoming bit-stream and to signal the user’s wishesto the provider. As technology matures, users expect more flexibility and so, over time morefunctionality (e.g. Picture-in-Picture) is implemented in the STB’s. This increases cost and powerdissipation, requires more updates and decreases reliability. A more economic and future-proofsolution consists of performing video-operations in the network itself, allowing to share dedicated,high-end hardware over many users.As video operations on H.264 compressed streams are nearly impossible, research to develop adedicated scalable hardware architecture allowing to decode/encode many video-streams in parallelis a first step in this direction. Due to the asymmetric character of the CODEC, the encodingprocess is far more challenging than the decoder process and imposes a tremendous computationalcomplexity. Research has led to the development of an intra frame encoder which can encode 32HD video streams simultaneously in real-time.—————————————————–The author would like to thank the Special Research Fund (BOF) for offering a Ph.D. grant.

Dedicated H.264/MPEG4 intra 4x4 encoder for network video processing

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/2913122/file/2913124

Dedicated H.264/MPEG4 intra 4x4 encoder for network video processing

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Ghent University Academic Bibliography