H.264 Advanced Video Coding has become the dominant video coding standard in the market, within a few years after the first version of the standard was completed by the ISO/IEC MPEG and the ITU-T VCEG groups in May 2003. That happened mainly due to the great coding efficiency of H.264. Compared to MPEG-2, the previous dominant standard, the H.264 compression ratio is about twice as higher for the same video quality. That makes H.264 ideal for a numerous of applications, such as video broadcasting, video streaming and video conferencing. However, the H.264 efficiency is achieved at the expense of the codec¢s complexity. H.264 complexity is about four times that of MPEG-2. As a consequence, many video coding issues, which have been addressed in previous standards, need to be re-considered. For example the H.264 encoding of a video in real time ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the modern wireless age, lightweight multimedia technology stimulates attractive commercial applications on a grand scale as well as highly specialized niche markets. In this regard, the design of efficient video compression systems meeting such key requirements as very low encoding complexity, transmission error robustness and scalability, is no straightforward task. The answer can be found in fundamental information theoretic results, according to which efficient compression can be achieved by leveraging knowledge of the source statistics at the decoder only, giving rise to distributed, or alias Wyner-Ziv, video coding. This dissertation engineers efficient lightweight Wyner-Ziv video coding schemes emphasizing on several design aspects and applications. The first contribution of this dissertation focuses on the design of effective side information generation techniques so as to boost the compression capabilities of Wyner-Ziv video coding systems. To this end, overlapped block motion estimation ...

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 ...

Motion estimation and compensation is of great importance for the compression of video sequences. In this dissertation a motion estimation/compensation approach based on a non-overlapping connected mesh of triangles is proposed. To manipulate the triangles within the connected mesh or ‘rubber sheet’ structure affin transforms are used which allow many different types of motion to be accurately modelled. Another advantage of this structure is that the non-overlapping triangles do not generate the typical artefacts associated with the current block based standards when operating at very low bitrates. The initial motion estimation/ compensation algorithms investigated implement a full search method which updates one vertex at a time matching sets of triangles between adjacent frames. Although the prediction performance is good the resulting computational load is high. This issue is addressed by deriving gradient-based algorithms which are found to be between one ...

Distributed source coding is a technique that allows to compress several correlated sources, without any cooperation between the encoders, and without rate loss provided that the decoding is joint. Motivated by this principle, distributed video coding has emerged, exploiting the correlation between the consecutive video frames, tremendously simplifying the encoder, and leaving the task of exploiting the correlation to the decoder. The first part of our contributions in this thesis presents the asymmetric coding of binary sources that are not uniform. We analyze the coding of non-uniform Bernoulli sources, and that of hidden Markov sources. For both sources, we first show that exploiting the distribution at the decoder clearly increases the decoding capabilities of a given channel code. For the binary symmetric channel modeling the correlation between the sources, we propose a tool to estimate its parameter, thanks to an ...

The dissertation deals with the problems of stereoscopic depth estimation and coding in multiview video systems, which are vital for development of the next generation three-dimensional television. The depth estimation algorithms known from literature, along with theoretical foundations are discussed. The problem of estimation of depth maps with high quality, expressed by means of accuracy, precision and temporal consistency, has been stated. Next, original solutions have been proposed. Author has proposed a novel, theoretically founded approach to depth estimation which employs Maximum A posteriori Probability (MAP) rule for modeling of the cost function used in optimization algorithms. The proposal has been presented along with a method for estimation of parameters of such model. In order to attain that, an analysis of the noise existing in multiview video and a study of inter-view correlation of corresponding samples of pictures have been ...

In lossless coding, compresssion and decompression of source data result in the exact recovery of the individual elements of the original source data. Lossless image / video coding is necessary in applications where no loss of pixel values is tolerable. Examples are medical imaging, remote sensing, in image/video archives and studio applications where tandem- and trans-coding are used in editing, which can lead to accumulating errors. Nearly-lossless coding is used in applications where a small error, defined as a maximum error or as a root mean square (rms) error, is tolerable. In lossless embedded coding, a losslessly coded bit stream can be decoded at any bit rate lower than the lossless bit rate. In this thesis, research on embedded lossless video coding based on a motion compensated framework, similar to that of MPEG-2, is presented. Transforms that map integers into ...

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 ...

An adaptive edge-enhanced correlation based robust and real-time visual tracking framework, and two machine vision systems based on the framework are proposed. The visual tracking algorithm can track any object of interest in a video acquired from a stationary or moving camera. It can handle the real-world problems, such as noise, clutter, occlusion, uneven illumination, varying appearance, orientation, scale, and velocity of the maneuvering object, and object fading and obscuration in low contrast video at various zoom levels. The proposed machine vision systems are an active camera tracking system and a vision based system for a UGV (unmanned ground vehicle) to handle a road intersection. The core of the proposed visual tracking framework is an Edge Enhanced Back-propagation neural-network Controlled Fast Normalized Correlation (EE-BCFNC), which makes the object localization stage efficient and robust to noise, object fading, obscuration, and uneven ...

In this thesis, we present the TM3270 VLIW media-processor, the latest of TriMedia processors, and describe the innovations with respect to its prede- cessor: the TM3260. We describe enhancements to the load/store unit design, such as a new data prefetching technique, and architectural enhancements, such as additions to the TriMedia Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). Examples of ISA enhancements include collapsed load operations, two-slot operations and H.264 specific CABAC decoding operations. All of the TM3270 innovations contribute to a common goal: a balanced processor design in terms of silicon area and power consumption, which enables audio and standard resolution video processing for both the connected and portable markets. To measure the speedup of the indi- vidual innovations of the TM3270 design, we evaluate processor performance on a set of complete video applications: motion estimation, MPEG2 encoding and temporal upconversion. Each of ...

The interest for the intelligent vehicle field has been increased during the last years, must probably due to an important number of road accidents. Many accidents could be avoided if a device attached to the vehicle would assist the driver with some warnings when dangerous situations are about to appear. In recent years, leading car developers have recorded significant efforts and support research works regarding the intelligent vehicle field where they propose solutions for the existing problems, especially in the vision domain. Road detection and following, pedestrian or vehicle detection, recognition and tracking, night vision, among others are examples of applications which have been developed and improved recently. Still, a lot of challenges and unsolved problems remain in the intelligent vehicle domain. Our purpose in this thesis is to design an Obstacle Recognition system for improving the road security by ...