We present a new method for generating thumbnail images from H.264/AVC coded bit streams. What distinguishes our approach from previous works is that it determines the thumbnail image pixels by summing the residual and estimate block averages. The residual block averages are directly acquired in the transform domain and the estimated block averages are calculated in the spatial domain. Due to the construction of the reference pixels in the spatial domain, the proposed method eliminates the source of mismatch error, thus the result does not suffer any degradation. The thumbnail images produced by the proposed method are indistinguishable to the ones by the method that decodes the H.264/AVC intra coded bit streams and then scales them down. For most images, the proposed method also executes almost 3 times faster than the down-scaling method at frequently used bandwidths.

In this paper, we propose a method of resizing images in the integer DCT domain employed by H.264/AVC. To accomplish this, we first derive the matrix scaling the image resolution, and then factorize the scaled DCT blocks and the post scaling factors (PF) from the matrix obtained from the multiplication of the scaling matrix and the original integer DCT blocks. Then, we separate the scaled DCT blocks into the integer scaling matrix and the scaled integer DCT blocks. The experiments show that the proposed method produces nearly the same performance as those operating in the real DCT domain.

We analyze the performance of an opportunistic transmission strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). We consider a transmission strategy called Binary Decision-Based Transmission (BDT), which is a common form of opportunistic transmission. The BDT scheme initiates transmission only when the channel quality exceeds the optimum threshold to avoid unsuccessful transmissions that waste energy. We formulate the Markov Decision Process (MDP) to identify an optimum threshold for transmission decisions in the BDT scheme.