Search

Recently, a new video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), has shown greatly improved coding efficiency by adopting hierarchical structures of coding unit (CU), prediction unit (PU), and transform unit (TU). To best achieve the coding efficiency, the best combinations of CU, PU, and TU must be found in the sense of the minimum rate-distortion (R-D) costs. Owing to this, a large computational complexity occurs. Among these CU, PU, and TU, the determination of CU sizes most significantly affects the R-D performance of HEVC encoders, which causes large computational costs in operation with PU and TU size determinations. In spite of recent works in the complexity reduction of HEVC encoders, most of the research has focused on the complexity reduction with fast CU split in intra slice coding and with early TU split in both intra and inter slice. In this paper, we propose a fast and an efficient CU encoding scheme based on the spatiotemporal encoding parameters of HEVC encoders, which consists of an improved early CU SKIP detection method and a fast CU split decision method. For the current CU block under encoding, the proposed scheme utilizes sample-adaptive-offset parameters as the spatial encoding parameter to estimate the texture complexity that affects the CU partition. In addition, the motion vectors, TU size, and coded block flag information are used as the temporal encoding parameters to estimate the temporal complexity that also affects the CU partition. The proposed scheme effectively utilizes the spatiotemporal encoding parameters that are the byproducts during the encoding process of HEVC without additionally required computation. The proposed novel fast CU encoding scheme significantly reduces the total encoding time with negligible RD-performance loss. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves the total encoding time savings of average 49.6% and 42.7% only with average 1.4% and 1.0% bit-rate losses for various test sequences under random access and low delay B conditions, respectively. The proposed scheme has an advantage on the implementation for parallel processing in pipeline structures of HEVC encoders due to its independency with neighboring CU blocks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this study, the performance of hierarchical transform coding is analysed with design of an order‐16 integer transform kernel. The proposed hierarchical transform‐coding structure is constructed with a set of 4 × 4, 8 × 8 and 16 × 16 integer transforms of variable transform block sizes, which takes the advantages of both lower and higher transform kernels by flexibly adapting to varying image characteristics of video sequences with homogeneous and complex regions. The proposed hierarchical transform‐coding structure is implemented as an extension to H.264/advanced video coding joint model. The authors show the effectiveness of the hierarchical variable‐sized block transform scheme by analysing the quantisation effects and the correlation among neighbouring pixels in video sequences of different spatial resolutions. The experimental results show that: (i) the variable‐sized block transform scheme with the hierarchical structure is advantageous to the texture regions with strong local edges and (ii) the higher‐order‐16 integer transform kernel itself is more effective for the homogeneous texture regions, which are often encountered in higher resolution sequences. Therefore these two features can complementarily work in an rate‐distortion (RD) optimised manner for various characteristics of the input signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, 3DTV has drawn much attention as a new broadcasting service. In spite of technical advances in 3DTV broadcasting services, there are two barriers that hinder the new services from being launched for terrestrial broadcasting: the lack of available bandwidth for transmission of additional-view video via terrestrial channel and backward compatibility with the legacy 2-D HDTV services. As an alternative, a hybrid stereoscopic video coding scheme is proposed for a stereoscopic 3DTV service, where one-view video is transmitted through the legacy broadcasting systems and the other one is delivered via broadband networks to which TV terminals are connected. In this paper, the proposed hybrid stereoscopic video coding scheme incorporates an MPEG-2 codec for backward compatibility with a legacy 2-D HDTV service and an HEVC codec with inter-view prediction coding as an extension to encode additional-view video sequences with high coding efficiency. The proposed inter-view prediction coding scheme in the extended HEVC incorporates an advanced motion and disparity vector prediction (AMDVP) method for enhanced motion- and disparity-compensated coding. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid stereoscopic video coding scheme achieves an average coding efficiency of 38.22% (32.86%) in BD-rate or 1.394 dB (1.235 dB) in BD-PSNR for the out-band (in-band) scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An intra-frame joint rate control scheme is first proposed for a hybrid coder to encode stereoscopic video, which is based on an optimization framework with a gradient-based quadratic rate-quantization model and a gradient-based linear distortion-quantization model. The proposed rate control scheme jointly works on the left and right encoders for stereoscopic video input by controlling the output bit rates of both encoders in the sense that the sum of the two decoded video qualities is maximized and the quality difference is maintained around a desired level for a given target bit budget at the same time. In experiments, the proposed intra-frame joint rate control scheme for the hybrid coder produces the average 0.62 dB gain in PSNR, 64.93% reduction in the mean PSNR differences and 72.04% reduction in the MSE of PSNR difference, compared with the independent rate control schemes of the MPEG-2 TM5 and H.264 JM 16. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Digital Multimedia Broadcasting Application Format—part 9 of the ISO/IEC 23000 MPEG-A Multimedia Application Formats standard—specifies a structured file format for securely packaging and interactively consuming DMB content. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ISO/IEC 23000-4 MPEG-A Part 4: The Musical Slide Show Application Format (MSS AF) standard is a storage format that specifies the synchronization of MP3 audio, Joint Picture Experts Group (JPEG) images and 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) timed text data in conjunction with the descriptions for image rendering animation using MPEG-4 Lightweight Application for Scene Representation (LASeR) scene representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Editor's NoteThis article describes a standardized packaging format for digital media files. Archiving is accomplished through a hierarchical file structure and rich contextual information, while preservation is realized by enabling portability in the structure and file attributes. Advanced functionality, such as usage governance, is supported by the packaging format.—Anthony Vetro [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]