Manipulation and compositing of MC-DCT compressed video

Abstract

Many advanced video applications require manipulations of compressed video signals. Popular video manipulation functions include overlap (opaque or semitransparent), translation, scaling, linear filtering, rotation, and pixel multiplication. We propose algorithms to manipulate compressed video in the compressed domain. Specifically, we focus on compression algorithms using the discrete cosine transform (DCT) with or without motion compensation (MC). Such compression systems include JPEG, motion JPEG, MPEG, and H.261. We derive a complete set of algorithms for all aforementioned manipulation functions in the transform domain, in which video signals are represented by quantized transform coefficients. Due to a much lower data rate and the elimination of decompression/compression conversion, the transform-domain approach has great potential in reducing the computational complexity. The actual computational speedup depends on the specific manipulation functions and the compression characteristics of the input video, such as the compression rate and the nonzero motion vector percentage. The proposed techniques can be applied to general orthogonal transforms, such as the discrete trigonometric transform. For compression systems incorporating MC (such as MPEG), we propose a new decoding algorithm to reconstruct the video in the transform domain and then perform the desired manipulations in the transform domain. The same technique can be applied to efficient video transcoding (e.g., from MPEG to JPEG) with minimal decoding. >