Fast schemes for compressed-domain image size change, are proposed. Fast Winograd DCTs are applied to resizing images by a factor of two to one. First, we speed up the DCT domain downsampling scheme which uses the bilinear interpolation. Then, we speed up other image resizing schemes which use DCT lowpass truncated approximations. The schemes proposed here reduce the computational complexities significantly, while there is no difference in the overall quality of the images compared to previous works.

This paper presents a memory-efficient motion estimation (ME) technique for high-resolution video compression. The main objective is to reduce the external memory access, especially for limited local memory resource. The reduction of memory access can successfully save the notorious power consumption. The key to reduce the memory accesses is based on center-biased algorithm in that the center-biased algorithm performs the motion vector (MV) searching with the minimum search data. While considering the data reusability, the proposed dual-search-windowing (DSW) approaches use the secondary windowing as an option per searching necessity. By doing so, the loading of search windows can be alleviated and hence reduce the required external memory bandwidth. The proposed techniques can save up to 81% of external memory bandwidth and require only 135 MBytes/sec, while the quality degradation is less than 0.2 dB for 720 p HDTV clips coded at 8 Mbits/sec.

We present an extended MPEG video format for efficient Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS). DVS technique has been widely researched, but the execution time variation of a periodic task (i.e. MPEG decoding) is still a challenge to be tackled. Unlike previous works, we focus on the data (video stream) rather than the execution code to overcome such limitation. The proposed video format provides the decoding costs of frames to help the precise prediction of their execution times at client machines. The experimental results show that the extended format only increases the data size less than 1% by adding about 10 bits representing the decoding cost of each frame. Also, a DVS technique adjusted for the proposed format achieves 90% of efficiency compared to the oracle case, while keeping the run time overhead of the technique negligible.

A new linear prediction analysis method for multichannel signals was devised, with the goal of enhancing the compression performance of the MPEG-4 Audio Lossless Coding (ALS) compliant encoder and decoder. The multichannel coding tool for this standard carries out an adaptively weighted subtraction of the residual signals of the coding channel from those of the reference channel, both of which are produced by independent linear prediction. Our linear prediction method tries to directly minimize the amplitude of the predicted residual signal after subtraction of the signals of the coding channel, and the method has been implemented in the MPEG-4 ALS codec software. The results of a comprehensive evaluation show that this method reduces the size of a compressed file. The maximum improvement of the compression ratio is 14.6% which is achieved at the cost of a small increase in computational complexity at the encoder and without increase in decoding time. This is a practical method because the compressed bitstream remains compliant with the MPEG-4 ALS standard.

Motion estimation (ME) is a computation-intensive module in video coding system. In MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoding, motion vector (MV) from MPEG-2 reused as search center in H.264 encoder is a simple but effective technique to simplify ME processing. However, directly applying MPEG-2 MV as search center will bring difficulties on application of data reuse method in hardware design, because the irregular overlapping of search windows between successive macro block (MB). In this paper, we propose a search window reuse scheme for transcoding, especially for HDTV application. By utilizing the similarity between neighboring MV, overlapping area of search windows can be regularized. Experiment results show that our method achieves average 93.1% search window reuse-rate in HDTV720p sequence with almost no video quality degradation. Compared to transcoding method without any data reuse scheme, bandwidth of the proposed method can be reduced to 40.6% of that.

A single-pass rate control algorithm based on motion estimation error statistics is presented. The algorithm consists of two steps. The first step deals with the target bit allocation for each frame. The complexity measure which determines the target bit allocation is calculated by using the motion estimation error statistics. The second step is to compute the bit spending profile within a frame. A nonlinear profile based on motion estimation statistics is used to allocate bits for each macroblock more efficiently. Experimental results show that the performance in terms of PSNR is significantly improved over a conventional rate control algorithm. Compared to the conventional algorithm, the new algorithm has little added complexity because it uses existing information from motion estimation.

We propose a method to prevent the degradation of decoded MPEG pictures caused by video transmission over error-prone networks. In this paper, we focus on the error concealment that is processed at the decoder without using any backchannels. Though there have been various approaches to this problem, they generally focus on minimizing the degradation measured frame by frame. Although this frame-level approach is effective in evaluating individual frame quality, in the sense of human perception, the most noticeable feature is the spatio-temporal discontinuity of the image feature in the decoded video image. We propose a novel error concealment algorithm comprising the combination of i) A spatio-temporal error recovery function with low processing cost, ii) A MB-based image fidelity tracking scheme, and iii) An adaptive post-filter using the fidelity information. It is demonstrated by experimental results that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the subjective degradation of corrupted MPEG video quality with about 30 % of additional decoding processing power.

Due to the decoding procedure and filtering for edge detection, the feature extraction process of MPEG-7 Edge Histogram Descriptor (EHD) is time-consuming and computationally expensive. We proposed the fast EHD generation method in wavelet domain of JPEG2000 images. Experimental results demonstrate the advantage of this method over EHD.

In this letter, we propose an enhanced method for inter-layer motion prediction in scalable video coding (SVC). For inter-layer motion prediction, the use of refined motion data in the Fine Granular Scalability (FGS) layer is proposed instead of the conventional use of motion data in the base quality layer to reduce the inter-layer redundancy efficiently. Experimental results show that the proposed method enhances coding efficiency without increasing the computational complexity of the decoder.

Ethical and legal requirements have made accessibility a crucial feature in any information systems. This paper presents a content adaptation framework, based on the MPEG-21 standard, to help low-vision users have better accessibility to visual contents. We first present an overview of MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) and the low-vision description tool which enables interoperable content adaptation. This description tool lists seven low-vision symptoms, namely loss of fine detail, lack of contrast, central vision loss, peripheral vision loss, hemianopia, light sensitivity, and need of light. Then we propose a systematic contrast-enhancement method to improve the content visibility for low-vision users, focusing on the first two symptoms. The effectiveness of the low-vision description tool and our adaptation framework is verified by some experiments with an adaptation test-bed. The major advantages of the proposed approach include 1) support of a wide range of low-vision conditions, and 2) customized content adaptation to specific characteristics of each user.

When the bit rate of a compressed video sequence is reduced by a frequency domain transcoder system, the rate control scheme plays a very important role in maintaining consistent video quality. In this paper, we propose an efficient rate control scheme based on the complexity of MB (Macro Block) while conventional transcoding schemes use that of a picture. Since the frequency domain transcoder has to calculate the spatial activity of MB to adjust the quantization step, a process of converting the DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) data into spatial one is required. The proposed scheme calculates the spatial activity from DCT data without converting them to pixel domain.

Transmitting multimedia data requires high bandwidth and low delay of the network. Today's wireless networks satisfy these requirements in ideal situations, but in practice multiple devices including those of neighboring networks share the same physical layer channel and the desired speeds in the wireless network can not be achieved. Traffic in one network causes interference to other neighboring networks. In this paper, we evaluate end user's playback quality of video content transmitted over a wireless network. We take into account the influence of interference from a neighboring network and define a multi-layer control strategy to maintain the quality on the network. Through simulations, we have obtained acceptable improvements in video playback quality by controlling the transmission power, the number of retransmissions, and other parameters at various layers.

This paper introduces an adaptive GOP structure (AGS), which adaptively defines the GOP structure according to the time-varying temporal properties of video sequences, and thus improves the coding efficiency of the MPEG & ITU-T's Joint Scalable Video Coding (JSVC) scheme, the method proposed in this paper, which adaptively modifies the size of GOP based on the image characteristics of video sequence, improves the coding efficiency up to 0.77 dB compared to the JSVC JSVM (Joint Scalable Video Model).

In this paper, we proposed an efficient coding method for digital hologram (fringe pattern) acquired with a CCD camera or by computer generation using multi-view prediction and MPEG video compression standard techniques. It processes each R, G, or B color component separately. The basic processing unit is a partial image segmented as the size of MN. Each partial image retains the information of the whole object. This method generates an assembled image for a column of the segmented and frequency-transformed partial images, which is the basis of the coding process. That is, a motion estimation and compensation technique of MPEG is applied between the reconstructed images from the assembled images with the disparities found during generation of assembled image and the original partial images. Therefore the compressed results are the disparity of each partial image to form the assembled image for the corresponding column, assembled image, and the motion vectors and the compensated image for each partial image. The experimental results with the implemented algorithm showed that the proposed method has NC (Normalized Correlation) values about 4% higher than the previous method at the same compression ratios, which convinced us that ours has better compression efficiency. Consequently, the proposed method is expected to be used effectively in the application areas to transmit or store in digital format the digital hologram data.

The coexistence of MPEG-2 and its powerful successor H.264/AVC has created a huge need for MPEG-2/H.264 video transcoding. However, a traditional transcoder where an MPEG-2 decoder is simply cascaded to an H.264 encoder requires huge computational power due to the adoption of a complicated rate-distortion based mode decision process in H.264. This paper proposes a 2-D Sobel filter based motion vector domain method and a DCT domain method to measure macroblock complexity and realize content-based H.264 candidate mode decision. A new local edge based fast INTRA prediction mode decision method is also adopted to boost the encoding efficiency. Simulation results confirm that with the proposed methods the computational burden of a traditional transcoder can be reduced by 20%30% with only a negligible bit-rate increase for a wide range of video sequences.

For super-parallel video processing, we proposed a power- and area-efficient SRAM core architecture with a segmentation-free access, which means accessibility to arbitrary consecutive pixels, and horizontal/vertical access. To achieve these flexible accesses, a spirally-connected local-wordline select signal and multi-selection scheme in wordlines are proposed, so that extra X-decoders in the conventional multi-division SRAM can be eliminated. Consequently, the proposed SRAM reduces a power and area by 57-60% and 60%, respectively, when it is applied to a 128 parallel architecture. The proposed 160-kbit SRAM with 16-read ports (2-read port SRAM with eight-parallel architecture) is implemented to a search window buffer for an H.264 motion estimation processor core which dissipates 800 µW for QCIF 15-fps in a 130-nm technology.

This paper provides an overview of the new tendencies in the subjective assessment of the quality of video for Multimedia applications. New subjective assessment methods are here described together with the description of the new general approaches. Some motivations of these new approaches are also here provided.

Color correction needs to be performed to improve the quality of image/video production. The typical methods realize the color correction mainly in the spatial domain of RGB color space. In this paper, a linear color correction method in JPEG/MPEG-2 compressed domain is proposed. The correction is realized in the DCT domain of YUV color space without full-frame decompression. Experimental results show that the visual quality of the corrected images/videos in the compressed domain is identical to the quality of the images/videos corrected in the uncompressed domain.

An H.264-based selective FGS coding scheme is proposed. It selectively uses the interframe-prediction data inside the enhancement-layer only when those data can significantly reduce the temporal-redundancies. Since this minimizes the drift effects, the overall coding efficiency is improved. Simulations show that average PSNR of the proposed scheme is higher by 1-3 dB and 3-5 dB than those of the H.264-based FGS and the MPEG-4 video FGS profile, respectively.

This paper briefly introduces the T-DMB standard based on Eureka-147 DAB and presents a new T-DMB transmission system, which uses a device called the Ensemble Remultiplexer, for mobile multimedia broadcasting service. And we verify the T-DMB standard by using the new transmission system with commercial equipment in the laboratory and in the field as moving on a car in high speed around urban districts surrounded by high buildings.