Audio And Video Coding Standard Research Articles

Evolution of AVS video coding standards: twenty years of innovation and development

Ever since the founding of the Audio and Video Coding Standard (AVS) Workgroup of China in 2002, it has been dedicated to advancing and innovating the digital audio-video industry with highly efficient and economical encoding/decoding technologies. Three representative generations of video coding standards have been finalized and published, consistently improving the coding performance in the past two decades. The series of AVS standards establish solid foundations for ubiquitous video applications in the areas including acquisition, coding, production, delivery, integrated system, public service, general screen content, and mixed reality media. Along with the standardization process, an extensive amount of studies have been carried out on efficiency-aware designation, algorithm optimization, and hardware implementation of these innovative video coding techniques. This paper explains how those developed techniques provide a lasting impact on the video coding community, extensively, technologically, and systematically. In particular, we provide a comprehensive survey of the three generations of the standards, and timely and in-depth summarize the efforts of the AVS video coding standards in the twenty years. The rate-distortion performance comparisons, in particular in terms of the 8K ultra-high-definition (UHD) contents, reflect the elegant design of the state-of-the-art AVS3 standards. We have also elaborated on a variety of well-established and promising applications, including commercial level real-time 8K encoder, high-frame-rate decoder chip for cell phone, and live streaming solution for sports. In addition, the China Central Television (CCTV) of China Media Group (CMG), the state television of China, has officially launched the first 8K broadcasting channel (CCTV-8K) since 2021 using AVS3. Given the significant success realized by the AVS standards, it is envisioned that a new era of 8K UHD video is arriving.

Efficient Software HEVC to AVS2 Transcoding

The second generation of Audio and Video coding Standard (AVS) is developed by the IEEE 1857 Working Group under project 1857.4 and was standardized in 2016 by the AVS Working Group of China as the new broadcasting standard AVS2. High Efficient Video Coding (HEVC) is the newest global video coding standard announced in 2013. More and more codings are migrating from H.264/AVC to HEVC because of its higher compression performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient HEVC to AVS2 transcoding algorithm, which applies a multi-stage decoding information utilization framework to maximize the usage of the decoding information in the transcoding process. The proposed algorithm achieves 11×–17× speed gains over the AVS2 reference software RD 14.0 with a modest BD-rate loss of 9.6%–16.6%.

AVS2 ? Making Video Coding Smarter [Standards in a Nutshell

AVS2 is a new generation of video coding standard developed by the IEEE 1857 Working Group under project 1857.4. AVS2 is also the second-generation video coding standard established by the Audio and Video Coding Standard (AVS) Working Group of China; the first-generation AVS1 was developed by the AVS Working Group and issued as Chinese national standard GB/T 20090.2-2006 in 2006. The AVS Working Group was founded in 2002 and is dedicated to providing the digital audio-video industry with highly efficient and economical coding/decoding technologies. So far, the AVS1 video coding standard is widely implemented in regional broadcasting, communication, and digital video entertainment systems. As the successor of AVS1, AVS2 is designed to achieve significant coding efficiency improvements relative to the preceding H.264/MPEG4-AVC and AVS1 standards. The basic coding framework of AVS2 is similar to the conterminous HEVC/H.265, but AVS2 can provide more efficient compression for certain video applications such as surveillance as well as low-delay communication such as videoconferencing. AVS2 is making video coding smarter by adopting intelligent coding tools that not only improve coding efficiency but also help with computer vision tasks such as object detection and tracking.

Fast Stereo Video Coding Based on C-Means Fuzzy Hopfield Neural Network and AVS

A fast stereo video coding method based-on C-Means Fuzzy Hopfield neural network and AVS (Audio and Video coding Standard) is presented in this paper. In the system, an AVS encoder encodes the left-view sequence. For the right-view sequence, combined predictions from the temporal or disparity domains are exploited, with a hierarchical two-stage neural classifier for fast mode decision. Experiment results show that our method can achieve up to 30% of time savings with nearly ignored quality degradation and only 7% of bit-rate increase.

Robust AVS audio watermarking

Part III of AVS (China Audio and Video Coding Standard) is the first generic audio standard proposed in China and is becoming popular in some applications. For MP3 audio, some efforts have been made to solve the copyright pirating and malicious modifications by the way of watermarking. To our best knowledge, similar work on the AVS audio has not been explored. In this paper, we present a novel robust watermarking algorithm for AVS audio. We find that the frame type in the AVS coded process can be used as a robust feature for watermarking. Then we design a novel watermarking algorithm which is integrated into the AVS audio coding process. The watermark bits are embedded into the compressed bit stream. At the extracting end, the watermark bits can be extracted from the compressed bit stream directly. This algorithm achieves robustness to decoding/re-coding attacks, and has low computation complexity for both embedding and extracting while preserving the quality of the audio signals.

2-D Order-16 Integer Transforms for HD Video Coding

In this paper, the spatial properties of high-definition (HD) videos are investigated based on a large set of HD video sequences. Compared with lower resolution videos, the prediction errors of HD videos have higher correlation. Hence, we propose using 2-D order-16 transforms for HD video coding, which are expected to be more efficient to exploit this spatial property, and specifically propose two types of 2-D order-16 integer transforms, nonorthogonal integer cosine transform (ICT) and modified ICT. The former resembles the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and is approximately orthogonal, of which the transform error introduced by the nonorthogonality is proven to be negligible. The latter modifies the structure of the DCT matrix and is inherently orthogonal, no matter what the values of the matrix elements are. Both types allow selecting matrix elements more freely by releasing the orthogonality constraint and can provide comparable performance with that of the DCT. Each type is integrated into the audio and video coding standard (AVS) Enhanced Profile (EP) and the H.264 high profile (HP), respectively, and used adaptively as an alternative to the 2-D order-8 transform according to local activities. At the same time, many efforts have been devoted to further reducing the complexity of the 2-D order-16 transforms and specially for the modified ICT, a fast algorithm is developed and extended to a universal approach. Experimental results show that 2-D order-16 transforms provide significant performance improvement for both AVS enhanced profile and H.264 high profile, which means they can be efficient coding tools especially for HD video coding.

AVS trick modes for PVR and VOD services

AVS1-P2 is a recently completed video compression standard developed by the Audio and Video Coding Standard (AVS) Workgroup of China. The standard promises comparable compression efficiency to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video codec with lower implementation complexity and royalty fees. AVS1-P2 is the Chinese next generation national video coding standard with an increasing amount of industrial importance as it is being required for different applications and services. It is expected that AVS1-P2 will be prominent in emerging Chinese digital video application markets, especially for personal video recorder (PVR) and video on demand (VOD). This paper discusses how trick modes for PVR and VOD can be performed with AVS1-P2 content. It begins with generating an index table to facilitate AVS1-P2 trick modes followed by a discussion of basic and advanced trick modes. Next, the minimum decoder speed and display frame buffer requirements are analyzed for smooth trick play, especially for 1× rewind. VOD stream delivery strategies for various trick modes and transitions are then discussed. Finally, an overview of other topics that may affect implementation such as content protection and encoding is provided. Many of the discussions are also applicable to other video coding standards like MPEG-2, H.264/AVC, etc.

Broadcast mobile TV system based on AVS

A broadcast mobile television system based on Audio and Video coding Standard(AVS)was introduced.The design includes the real time encoder of video and audio,the multiplexer of AVS system,the T-DMB transmit system,decoder and playback on the mobile phone and PC.The experimental results show that the broadcast mobile television system based on AVS is feasible.

Basic Considerations on AVS DRM Architecture

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an important infrastructure for the digital media age. It is a part of the AVS (Audio and Video coding Standard) of China. AVS Trusted Decoder (ATD) that plays back digital media program according to rights conditions is the core of AVS DRM architecture. Adaptation layers are responsible for translating or negotiating between ATD and peripheral systems. The Packaging Adaptation Layer (PAL), Licensing Adaptation Layer (LAL) and Rendering Adaptation Layer (RAL) will help ATD to gain the interoperability in various DRM environments.