This paper describes advanced rate control technologies suitable for the digital compression coding based on MPEG-2 multi-view profile for transmitting three dimensional stereo HDTV signals at bit-rates 45 Mbps for PDH networks or 52 Mbps for SDH networks. First of all, a common buffer control is introduced, which achieves statistical multiplexing effect while keeping the picture qualify of both the left and right pictures well balanced. Under the assumption of applying this common buffer control, we investigate the optimal setting of GOP structure which has a close relation with the rate control. And then, a discriminatory bit allocation is proposed which improves the left picture quality without any degradation of the right picture. From the results of coding experiment conducted to evaluate the coding picture achieved by this coding scheme, it is confined that our coding scheme gives satisfactory picture quality even at 45 Mbps including audio and FEC data.

Advanced rate control technologies for 3D-HDTV digital coding based on MPEG-2 multi-view profile

In the last decade, we have witnessed a phenomenal growth of communication and information technologies. These technologies have greatly simplified and even enriched our daily lives; cellular telephony and the Internet are probably the most striking examples. A particularly promising, and at the same time challenging, aspect of both technologies is the transmission and use of visual information. The author overviews the state of visual communication at the end of the 20th century, discusses today's challenges, and outlines some future directions.

Visual communications of tomorrow: natural, efficient, and flexible

A power-aware SNR progressive DCT/IDCT IP core design for multimedia transform coding is proposed. The proposed IP core possesses the feature of power-aware design flexibility, allowing the trade-off of lower power consumption with less demand of data precision in developing its instruction library. Relationships of energy reduction and data quality degradation in the examples of both JPEG still images and MPEG4 video sequences have been analyzed. Since the proposed IP core is developed based on the concept of programmable processors, we can select a DCT/IDCT firmware library of different precisions of cosine coefficients according to the accuracy requirement of various applications. This design has been realized based on a 0.35-/spl mu/m CMOS technology and costs about 2175 gates with 8 words of RAM, which can achieve real-time processing of the texture coding in an MPEG4 SP@L3 codec system for CIF video at 30 frames per second (fps).

A power-aware SNR-progressive DCT/IDCT IP core design for multimedia transform coding

This paper proposes a new stereo sequence transmission technique using digital watermarking for compatibility with conventional 2D digital TV. We, generally, compress and transmit image sequence using temporal-spatial redundancy between stereo images. It is difficult for users with conventional digital TV to watch the transmitted 3D image sequence because many 3D image compression methods are different. To solve such a problem, in this paper, we perceive the concealment of new information of digital watermarking and conceal information of the other stereo image into three channels of the reference image. The main target of the technique presented is to let the people who have conventional DTV watch stereo movies at the same time. This goal is reached by considering the response of human eyes to color information and by using digital watermarking. To hide right images into left images effectively, bit-change in 3 color channels and disparity estimation according to the value of estimated disparity are performed. The proposed method assigns the displacement information of right image to each channel of YCbCr on DCT domain. Each LSB bit on YCbCr channels is changed according to the bits of disparity information. The performance of the presented methods is confirmed by several computer experiments.

Stereo sequence transmission via conventional transmission channel

A novel video sequence compression scheme is proposed in order to realize the efficient and economical transmission of
video sequence, and also the region-based functionality of MPEG-4. The CPM and NCIM fractal coding scheme is
applied on each region independently by a prior image segmentation map (alpha plane) which is exactly the same as
defined in MPEG-4. The first n frames of video sequence are encoded as a "set" using the Circular Prediction Mapping
(CPM) and encode the remaining frames using the Non Contractive Interframe Mapping (NCIM). The CPM and NCIM
accomplish the motion estimation and compensation, which can exploit the high temporal correlations between the
adjacent frames of video sequence. The experimental results with the monocular video sequences provide promising
performances at low bit rate coding, such as the application in video conference. We believe the proposed fractal video
codec will be a powerful and efficient technique for the region-based video sequence coding.

Yao Wang

Papers

Special Issue on 3-D Video Technology

Special issue: Multimedia communications over networks

Special issue: 3D video technology