Improving low bitrate video coding via computation incorporating a priori information

Abstract

The growing number of mobile users, as well as the diversification in types of services have resulted in increasing demands for wireless network bandwidth in recent years. Although evolving transmission techniques are able to enlarge the network capacity to some degree, they still cannot satisfy the requirements of mobile users. Meanwhile, following Moore's Law, the data processing capabilities of mobile user terminals are continuously improving. In this paper, we explore possible methods of trading strong computational power at wireless terminals for transmission efficiency of communications. Taking the specific scenario of wireless video conversation, we propose a model-based video coding scheme by learning the structures in multimedia contents. Benefiting from both strong computing capability and pre-learned model priors, only low-dimensional parameters need to be transmitted; and the intact multimedia contents can also be reconstructed at the receivers in real-time. Experiment results indicate that, compared to conventional video codecs, the proposed scheme significantly reduces the data rate with the aid of computational capability at wireless terminals.