The addition of comfort noise to an image serves to hide compression artifacts. To facilitate comfort noise addition, supplemental information accompanying a video image contains at least one parameter that specifies an attribute regarding comfort noise. Typically, the supplemental information includes parameters that function to turn the comfort noise on and off, as well as to indicate the level of noise to add, based on the expected level of compression artifacts.

Technique for bit-accurate comfort noise addition

A system and method that provides an efficient scheme to code images and video by exploiting spatial correlations within an image by employing hybrid directional prediction and lifting wavelet techniques.

System and method for image coding employing a hybrid directional prediction and wavelet lifting

To simulate film grain in a compressed video signal, a decoder (15, 28) receives a message containing information that contains a set of one or more parameters, each specifying certain attribute associated with the film grain. For example, one of the parameters will specify the model used to simulate the film grain, whereas other parameters each specify a particular factor associated with that model. Upon receipt of the message, the decoder selects the model, and simulates the film grain for addition to the video signal following decompression.

Method and apparatus for representing image granularity by one or more parameters

SMART, the acronym of scalable media adaptation and robust transport, is a suite of compression and transmission technologies for efficient, scalable, adaptive, and robust video streaming over the best-effort Internet. It consists of two indispensable parts: SMART video coding and SMART video streaming. The SMART video coding part is an efficient DCT-based universal fine granularity scalable coding scheme. Since the SMART video coding scheme adopts multiple-loop prediction and drifting reduction techniques at the macroblock level, it can achieve high coding efficiency at a wide range of bit rates. More importantly, it provides all sorts of scalabilities, that is, quality, temporal, spatial, and complexity scalabilities, in order to accommodate heterogeneous time-variant networks and different devices. The SMART video streaming part is a transport scheme that fully takes advantages of the special features of the scalable bitstreams. An accurate bandwidth estimation method is first discussed as the prerequisite of network adaptation. Then, flexible error resilience technique and unequal error protection strategy are investigated to enhance the robustness of streaming SMART bitstream. The SMART system shows excellent performances with regard to high coding efficiency, flexible channel bandwidth adaptation, smooth playback, and superior error robustness in static and dynamic experiments.

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SMART: an efficient, scalable, and robust streaming video system

There are provided methods and apparatus for film grain SEI message insertion for bit-accurate simulation in a video system. A method for simulating film grain in an ordered sequence includes the steps of providing (305) film grain supplemental information corresponding to a plurality of intra coded pictures, and providing (310) additional film grain supplemental information corresponding to inter coded pictures between consecutive intra coded pictures, in decode order. The inter coded pictures are selected based upon display order.

Film grain sei message insertion for bit-accurate simulation in a video system

A flexible and effective macroblock-based framework for hybrid spatial and fine-grain SNR scalable video coding is proposed in this paper. In the proposed framework, the base layer is of low resolution and is generally encoded at low bit rates with traditional prediction based coding schemes. Two enhancement layers, i.e., the low-resolution enhancement layer and the high-resolution enhancement layer, are generated to improve the video quality of the low-resolution base layer and evolve smoothly from low resolution to high resolution video with increasingly better quality, respectively. Since bit plane coding and drifting control techniques are applied to the two enhancement layers, each enhancement bitstream is fine-grain scalable and can be arbitrarily truncated to fit in the available channel bandwidth. In order to improve the coding efficiency and reduce the drifting errors at the high-resolution enhancement layer, five macroblock coding modes with different forms of motion compensation and reconstruction, are proposed in this paper. Furthermore, a mode decision algorithm is developed to select the appropriate coding mode for each macroblock at the high-resolution enhancement layer. Compared with the traditional spatial scalable coding scheme, the proposed framework not only provides the spatial scalability but also provides the fine granularity quality scalability at the same resolution.

Ran Tao

Papers

Efficient video coding with hybrid spatial and fine-grain SNR scalabilities