In the current heterogeneous communication environments, the great variety of multimedia systems and applications combined with fast evolution of networking architectures and topologies, give rise to new research problems related to the various elements of the communication chain. This includes, the ever present problem in video communications, which results from the need for coping with transmission errors and losses. In this context, video streaming with path diversity appeared as a novel communication framework, involving different technological fields and posing several research challenges. The research work carried out in this thesis is a contribution to robust video coding and adaptation techniques in the field of Multiple Description Coding (MDC) for multipath video streaming. The thesis starts with a thorough study of MDC and its theoretical basis followed by a description of the most important practical implementation aspects currently available in literature. ...

In scalable image/video coding, high resolution content is encoded to the highest visual quality and the bit-streams are adapted to cater various communication channels, display devices and usage requirements. These content adaptations, which include quality, resolution and frame rate scaling may also affect the content protection data, such as, watermarks and are considered as a potential watermark attack. In this thesis, research on robust watermarking techniques for scalable coded image and video, are proposed and the improvements in robustness against various content adaptation attacks, such as, JPEG 2000 for image and Motion JPEG 2000, MC-EZBC and H.264/SVC for video, are reported. The spread spectrum domain, particularly wavelet-based image watermarking schemes often provides better robustness to compression attacks due to its multi-resolution decomposition and hence chosen for this work. A comprehensive and comparative analysis of the available wavelet-based watermarking schemes,is performed ...

This thesis investigates the problem of robust coding and error concealment in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). After a review of the current state of the art, a simulation study about error robustness, revealed that the HEVC has weak protection against network losses with significant impact on video quality degradation. Based on this evidence, the first contribution of this work is a new method to reduce the temporal dependencies between motion vectors, by improving the decoded video quality without compromising the compression efficiency. The second contribution of this thesis is a two-stage approach for reducing the mismatch of temporal predictions in case of video streams received with errors or lost data. At the encoding stage, the reference pictures are dynamically distributed based on a constrained Lagrangian rate-distortion optimization to reduce the number of predictions from a single reference. At the ...

Scalable representation of a source (e.g., image/video/3D mesh) enables decoding of the encoded bit-stream on a variety of end-user terminals with varying display, storage and processing capabilities. Furthermore, it allows for source communication via channels with different transmission bandwidths, as the source rate can be easily adapted to match the available channel bandwidth. From a different perspective, error-resilience against channel losses is also very important when transmitting scalable source streams over lossy transmission channels. Driven by the aforementioned requirements of scalable representation and error-resilience, this dissertation focuses on the analysis and design of scalable single and multiple description scalar quantizers. In the first part of this dissertation, we consider the design of scalable wavelet-based semi-regular 3D mesh compression systems. In this context, our design methodology thoroughly analyzes different modules of the mesh coding system in order to single-out appropriate design ...

The third generation of mobile systems brought higher data rates that allow for provisioning of multimedia services containing also video. The real-time services like video call, conferencing, and streaming are particularly challenging for mobile communication systems due to the wireless channel quality variations. The mechanism for video compression utilizes a hybrid of temporal and spatial prediction, transform coding and variable length coding. The combination of these methods provides high compression gain, but at the same time makes the encoded stream more prone to errors. In this thesis, techniques for error resilient transmission of video streaming over wireless mobile networks are investigated. Focus is given to the recent H.264/AVC standard, although the ma jority of the proposed method apply to other video coding standards, too. The first part is dedicated to exploiting the residual redundancy of the received video stream at ...

Video signals are sequences of natural images, where images are often modeled as piecewise-smooth signals. Hence, video can be seen as a 3D piecewise-smooth signal made of piecewise-smooth regions that move through time. Based on the piecewise-smooth model and on related theoretical work on rate-distortion performance of wavelet and oracle based coding schemes, one can better analyze the appropriate coding strategies that adaptive video codecs need to implement in order to be efficient. Efficient video representations for coding purposes require the use of adaptive signal decompositions able to capture appropriately the structure and redundancy appearing in video signals. Adaptivity needs to be such that it allows for proper modeling of signals in order to represent these with the lowest possible coding cost. Video is a very structured signal with high geometric content. This includes temporal geometry (normally represented by motion ...

With the latest developments in video coding technology and fast deployment of end-user broadband internet connections, real-time media applications become increasingly interesting for both private users and businesses. However, the internet remains a best-effort service network unable to guarantee the stringent requirements of the media application, in terms of high, constant bandwidth, low packet loss rate and transmission delay. Therefore, efficient adaptation mechanisms must be derived in order to bridge the application requirements with the transport medium characteristics. Lately, different network architectures, e.g., peer-to-peer networks, content distribution networks, parallel wireless services, emerge as potential solutions for reducing the cost of communication or infrastructure, and possibly improve the application performance. In this thesis, we start from the path diversity characteristic of these architectures, in order to build a new framework, specific for media streaming in multipath networks. Within this framework we ...

High compression ratio, scalability and reliability are the main issues for transmitting multimedia content over best effort networks. Scalable image and video coding meets the user requirements by truncating the scalable bitstream at different quality, resolution and frame rate. However, the performance of scalable coding deteriorates rapidly over packet networks if the base layer packets are lost during transmission. Multiple description coding (MDC) has emerged as an effective source coding technique for robust image and video transmission over lossy networks. In this research problem of incorporating scalability in MDC for robust image and video transmission over best effort network is addressed. The first contribution of this thesis is to propose a strategy for generating more than two descriptions using multiple description scalar quantizer (MDSQ) with an objective to jointly decoded any number of descriptions in balanced and unbalanced manner. The ...

Digital video technology has been characterized by a steady growth in the last decade. New applications like video e-mail, third generation mobile phone video communications, videoconferencing, video streaming on the web continuously push for further evolution of research in digital video coding. In order to be sent over the internet or even wireless networks, video information clearly needs compression to meet bandwidth requirements. Compression is mainly realized by exploiting the redundancy present in the data. A sequence of images contains an intrinsic, intuitive and simple idea of redundancy: two successive images are very similar. This simple concept is called temporal redundancy. The research of a proper scheme to exploit the temporal redundancy completely changes the scenario between compression of still pictures and sequence of images. It also represents the key for very high performances in image sequence coding when compared ...

VIDEO streaming over cellular networks has been made possible in the last years by better performing video codecs and wireless cellular networks oriented to data transmission. The interaction between two heterogeneous worlds, the telecommunication infrastructure and the coding video software, calls for advanced optimization mechanisms. The actors involved in the optimization process are the cellular system's access network, UMTS and HSDPA, the wireless transmission channel and the fi nal user equipped with a mobile device capable of decoding video sequences. The knowledge and characterization of each of the building blocks allow the optimization of each element to the specifi c needs of the others. This doctoral thesis discusses three main contributions. In the fi rst part, the e ffects of transmission errors on video streams are analyzed. Incorrectly received video packets are usually discarded by the lower layers and not ...

For the provisioning of video streaming services it is essential to provide a required level of customer satisfaction, given by the perceived video stream quality. It is therefore important to choose the compression parameters as well as the network settings so that they maximize the end-user quality. Due to video compression improvements of the newest video coding standard H.264/AVC, video streaming for low bit and frame rates is possible while preserving its perceptual quality. This is especially suitable for video applications in 3G wireless networks. Mobile video streaming is characterized by low resolutions and low bitrates. The commonly used resolutions are Quarter Common Intermediate Format (QCIF,176x144 pixels) for cell phones, Common Intermediate Format (CIF, 352x288 pixels) and Standard Interchange Format (SIF or QVGA, 320x240 pixels) for data-cards and palmtops (PDA). The mandatory codec for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) streaming ...

In this thesis, we propose Multiple Objective Optimization (MOO) frameworks for efficient video streaming. Firstly, we introduce pre-roll delay-distortion optimization (DDO) for uninterrupted content-adaptive video streaming over low capacity, constant bitrate (CBR) channels using MOO. Content analysis is used to divide the input video into shots with assigned relevance levels. The video is adaptively encoded and streamed aiming minimum pre-roll delay and distortion with the optimal spatial and temporal resolutions and quantization parameters for each shot. With buffer and distortion constraints, the bitrate of unimportant shots is reduced to achieve an acceptable quality in important shots. Secondly, we introduce a cross-layer optimized video rate adaptation and scheduling scheme to achieve maximum "application layer" Quality-of-Service (QoS), maximum video throughput (video seconds per transmission slot), and QoS fairness for wireless video streaming. Using the MOO framework, these objectives are jointly optimized such ...

In recent years, the usage of digital video has steadily been increasing. Since the amount of data for uncompressed digital video representation is very high, lossy source coding techniques are usually employed in digital video systems to compress that information and make it more suitable for storage and transmission. The source coding algorithms for video compression can be grouped into two big classes: the traditional and the scalable techniques. The goal of the traditional video coders is to maximize the compression efficiency corresponding to a given amount of compressed data. The goal of scalable video coding is instead to give a scalable representation of the source, such that subsets of it are able to describe in an optimal way the same video source but with reduced resolution in the temporal, spatial and/or quality domain. This thesis is focused on the ...

A wide range of techniques for coding a single-channel speech and audio signal has been developed over the last few decades. In addition to pure redundancy reduction, sophisticated source and receiver models have been considered for reducing the bit-rate. Traditionally, speech and audio coders are based on different principles and thus each of them offers certain advantages. With the advent of high capacity channels, networks, and storage systems, the bit-rate versus quality compromise will no longer be the major issue; instead, attributes like low-delay, scalability, computational complexity, and error concealments in packet-oriented networks are expected to be the major selling factors. Typical audio coders such as MP3 and AAC are based on subband or transform coding techniques that are not easily reconcilable with a low-delay requirement. The reasons for their inherently longer delay are the relatively long band splitting filters ...

Wyner-Ziv (WZ) video coding is a particular case of distributed video coding, a new video coding paradigm based on the Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv theorems which mainly exploit the source correlation at the decoder and not only at the encoder as in predictive video coding. Therefore, this new coding paradigm may provide a flexible allocation of complexity between the encoder and the decoder and in-built channel error robustness, interesting features for emerging applications such as low-power video surveillance and visual sensor networks among others. Although some progress has been made in the last eight years, the rate-distortion performance of WZ video coding is still far from the maximum performance attained with predictive video coding. The WZ video coding compression efficiency depends critically on the capability to model the correlation noise between the original information at the encoder and its estimation generated ...