Dynamic Replacement of Video Coding Elements Articles uri icon

authors

  • BYSTROM, M.
  • RICHARDSON, I.
  • kANNANGARA, S.
  • FRUTOS LOPEZ, MANUEL DE

publication date

  • April 2010

start page

  • 303

end page

  • 313

issue

  • 4

volume

  • 25

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0165-1684

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1872-7557

abstract

  • The long timescale between the development of new technologies for video coding and their adoption into standards results in a slow improvement in compression efficiency despite the scale of ongoing research into new
    compression techniques. Standards-based codecs have limited
    capabilities to adapt to changes in video content, delivery
    environments, or platforms. There is a growing recognition, for example,
    with the MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding initiative, that increased
    codec flexibility is needed. However, we anticipate that even further
    developments are required to address these stumbling blocks to video
    coder advancement. To this end, we present a new approach to video
    coding which enables flexible and dynamic re-configuration of video
    coding functions. This adaptability is achieved by sending configuration
    information to the decoder during a communications session as part of
    the compressed video signal. The decoder responds to this information by
    reconfiguring itself to adapt the video decoding process as prompted by
    the encoder. In this paper we describe a particular example of how
    dynamic re-configuration may be implemented in a simple video coding
    scenario, namely, a video coder is reconfigured dynamically by sending
    descriptions of new transforms during coding. We evaluate five
    approaches to re-configuration and show that all demonstrate
    rate-distortion gains over baseline coders, despite the rate increase
    due to sending configuration information.