Transmitted Motion Vectors Research Articles

Distributed video coding supporting hierarchical GOP structures with transmitted motion vectors

Abstract In this paper, we propose a new distributed video coding (DVC) method, with hierarchical group of picture (GOP) structure. Coding gain of DVC can be significantly improved by enlarging GOP size for slow-moving frames. The proposed DVC decoder estimates a side information (SI) frame and transmits motion vectors (MVs) of the SI to the proposed encoder. Using the received MVs from the decoder, the proposed encoder can generate a predicted SI (PSI), which is the same as the SI in the decoder, and estimate the quality of PSI with minimal computational complexity. The proposed method decides the best coding mode among key, Wyner-Ziv (WZ), and skip modes, by estimating rate-distortion costs. Based on the selected best coding mode, the best GOP size can be automatically determined. As the GOP size is adaptively decided depending on the SI quality, entropy and parity bits can be effectively consumed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is around 0.80 dB better in Bjøntegaard delta (BD) bitrate than an existing conventional DVC system.

엔트로피 코딩 기반의 분산 비디오 코딩을 위한 블록 기반 복잡도 분배

In this paper, a complexity-balancing algorithm is proposed for distributed video coding based on entropy coding. In order to reduce complexity of DVC-based decoders, the proposed method employs an entropy coder instead of channel coders and the complexity-balancing method is designed to improve RD performance with minimal computational complexity. The proposed method performs motion estimation in the decoder side and transmits the estimated motion vectors to the encoder. The proposed encoder can perform more accurate refinement using the transmitted motion vectors from the decoder. During the motion refinement, the optimal predicted motion vectors are decided by the received motion vector and the predicted motion vectors and complexity load of block is allocated by adjusting the search range based on the difference between the received motion vector and the predicted motion vectors. The computational complexity of the proposed encoder is decreased 11.9% compared to the H.264/AVC encoder and that of the proposed decoder are reduced 99% compared to the conventional DVC decoder.

Multichannel regularized recovery of compressed video sequences

In this paper, we propose a multichannel regularized recovery approach to ameliorate coding artifacts in compressed video. The major advantage of the proposed approach is that both temporal and spatial correlations in a video sequence can be exploited to complement the compressed video data. In particular a temporal regularization term is introduced to enforce smoothness along the motion trajectories defined by the transmitted motion vectors for motion compensation. Several forms of temporal regularization with different computational complexity are considered. Based on the proposed approach, recovered images are obtained from the compressed data using the well-known gradient-projection algorithm. Moreover, an iterative algorithm is proposed for the determination of regularization parameters at the coder side. A number of numerical experiments using several H.261 and H.263 compressed streams are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed recovery algorithms. Results from these experiments demonstrate that the use of temporal regularization ran yield significant improvement in the quality of the recovered images-in terms of both visual evaluation and objective peak-signal-to-noise (PSNR) measure.

Hierarchical motion estimator (HME) for block-based video coders

A hierarchical block-based motion estimation strategy for video sequence coding is proposed, which allows to reduce both the computational load and the number of transmitted motion vectors. The estimation is performed by first computing a coarse motion field at the lowest resolution of a Gaussian pyramid and then propagating and refining it till the maximum resolution. the main innovations concern the adaptive vector propagation and updating strategy, which allow an efficient recovery from wrong estimates while maintaining a low computational load. The advantages of the proposed method are manifold: first, it is able to decrease the computation of even two orders magnitude for an equivalent compensation; second, it generates a lower number of motion vectors, resulting in a lower information rate; third, it produces a more homogeneous motion field, thus easing a successive segmentation.

Temporal image sequence prediction using motion field interpolation

Abstract A new method for motion-compensated temporal prediction of image sequences is proposed. Motion vector fields in natural scenes should possess two basic properties. First, the field should be smoothly varying within moving objects to compensate for nonrigid or rotational motion, and scaling of objects. Second, the field should be discontinuous along the boundaries of the objects. In the proposed method the motion vector field is modelled using finite element methods and interpolated using adaptive interpolators to satisfy the above-stated requirements. This is particularly important when only very sparse estimates of motion vector fields are available in the decoder due to bit-rate constraints limiting the amount of overhead information that can be transmitted. The proposed prediction method can be applied for low-bit-rate video coding in conventional codecs based on motion-compensated prediction and transform coding, as well as in model-based codecs. The performance of the proposed method is compared with standard motion-compensated prediction based on block matching. It is shown that for simple video telephony scenes a reduction of more than 30% in the energy of the prediction error can be achieved with an unchanged number of transmitted motion vectors and with only a modest increase in computational complexity. When implemented in an H.261 codec the new prediction method can improve the peak SNR 1–2 dB producing a significant visual improvement.