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This report deals with the possibilities of creating a system for a point-to-point audio- and video communication link, using cheap and simple hardware. The system will be using a local area network based on Ethernet and IP. This work was focused around the Raspberry Pi and its possibilities and limitations, regarding this type of application. The usage of a Raspberry Pi was also compared to using a conventional mini-PC for the same purpose. The overall goal was to achieve a system for point to point audio- and video communication of a very high quality, preferrably HD quality. The users of the system are supposed to get a feeling of live communication. To achieve this a very large monitor was used at each node. The monitor, microphone, camera and speaker are to be integrated into a frame that is hung on a wall in order to resemble a window. When you want to talk to somebody at the other node, you just walk up to this window and call upon the person you want to speak to, since the communications link is always active. This system could be used for distance meetings, distance lectures and in other similar situations. The results indicated that the Raspberry Pi was very capable of handling either transmission or reception of HD quality signals, but for full duplex communication a setup using two separate Raspberry Pis per node is recommended – one for transmission and one for reception. Another solution would be to choose a more powerful hardware platform,for instance a mini-PC, instead of the Raspberry Pi.

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La migration vers la résolution HD de la plupart des applications multimédias visuelles a nécessité la création de nouveaux standards de compression vidéo tels que le H264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding) et le HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding). Ces standards sont caractérisés par des hautes performances de codage en termes de taux de compression et qualité vidéo par rapport aux normes précédentes. Cependant, ces performances entraînent de grandes complexités de calcul ce qui rend difficile d'assurer un encodage en temps réel pour la résolution HD sur des processeurs monocœurs programmables qui sont les plus répandus. De plus, comme actuellement les systèmes embarqués sont de plus en plus utilisés dans diverses applications multimédias, concevoir une solution logicielle embarquée pour l'encodeur H264/AVC constitue ainsi un défit très difficile puisqu'il faut répondre aux exigences de l'embarqué au niveau des ressources matérielles comme la mémoire et de la consommation d'énergie. Les récents systèmes embarqués dotés de la technologie multicœur représentent une solution attractive pour surmonter ces problèmes. Dans ce contexte, cette thèse s'intéresse à exploiter la performance de la nouvelle génération de DSP multicœurs de Texas Instruments pour concevoir un encodeur H264/AVC embarqué de résolution HD fonctionnant en temps réel. Nous visons une solution logicielle, caractérisée par une forte flexibilité, par rapport aux IPs existants, qui permet de tout paramétrer (qualité, débit etc). Cette flexibilité logicielle permet aussi l'évolutivité de système en suivant les améliorations de codage comme la migration vers la nouvelle norme HEVC, partiellement abordée dans cette thèse. Nous présentons ainsi les diverses optimisations appliquées que ce soient algorithmiques, architecturales et structurelles afin d'améliorer la vitesse d'encodage sur un seul cœur DSP avant de passer à une implémentation multicœur. Ensuite, nous proposons des implémentations parallèles de l'encodeur H264/AVC sur différentes unités de calcul en exploitant le parallélisme potentiel au sein de la chaîne d'encodage afin de satisfaire la contrainte de temps réel tout en assurant une bonne performance de codage en termes de qualité vidéo et débit binaire. Nous étudions également le problème d'allocation des ressources (ressources de calcul, ressources mémoire, ressources de communication) avec de fortes contraintes temporelles d'exécution. Finalement, cette thèse ouvre la voie vers l'implémentation de la nouvelle norme de codage vidéo HEVC sur deux systèmes embarqués monocœurs dans le but de préparer une solution logicielle embarquée pour les futurs travaux de recherche / The trend toward HD resolution in most of visual multimedia applications has involved the emergence of a large number of video compression standards such as H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding) and HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding). These standards are characterized by high coding performances in terms of compression ratio and video quality compared to previous standards. However, these performances come with large computational complexities which make it difficult to meet real-time encoding for HD resolution on the most common single-core programmable processors. Moreover, as embedded systems have become increasingly used in various multimedia applications, designing an embedded software solution for the H264/AVC encoder represents another difficult challenge since we have to meet the embedded requirements in terms of hardware resources such as memory and power consumption. The new embedded systems with multicore technology represent an attractive solution to overcome these problems. In this context, this thesis is interested in exploiting the performance of the new generation of Texas Instruments multicore DSPs to design an embedded real-time H264/AVC high definition video encoder. We aim a software solution, characterized by high flexibility that allows setting all parameters (quality, bitrate etc) compared to existing IPs. This software flexibility allows also the system scalability by following the coding enhancements as the migration to the newest HEVC standard. Thus, we present the algorithmic, architectural, and structural optimizations which are applied to improve the encoding speed on a single DSP core before moving to a multicore implementation. Then, we propose parallel implementations of the H264/AVC encoder exploiting the multicore architecture of our platform and the potential parallelism in the encoding chain in order to meet real-time constraints while ensuring a good performance in terms of bitrate and video quality. We also explore the problem of resources allocation (computing resources, storage resources, communication resources) with hard execution time constraints. Finally, this thesis opens the way towards the implementation of the new HEVC video coding standard on two embedded systems in order to prepare a software solution for future research

<p>To provide universal multimedia experience, multimedia streaming services need to transparently handle the variation and heterogeneity in operating environment. From the standpoint of streaming application, video adaptation techniques are intended to cope with the environmental variations by utilizing manipulations of the video content itself. Scalable video coding (SVC) schemes, like that suggested by the standards H.264 and its SVC extension, is highly attractive for designing a self-adaptive video streaming system. When SVC is employed in streaming system, the produced video stream can be then easily truncated or tailored to form several sub-streams which can be decoded separately to obtain a range of preferable picture size, quality and frame rate. However, questions about how to perform the adaptation using SVC and how much adaptation SVC enables are still remaining research issues. We still lack a thorough understanding of how to automate the scaling procedure in order to achieve an optimal video Quality-of-Experience for end users.</p><p>Video QoE, depends highly on human perception. In this thesis, we introduce several video QoE studies around the usability of H.264 SVC. Several factors that contribute significantly to the overall QoEs have been identified and evaluated in these studies. As an example of application usage related factor, playback smoothness and application response time are critical performance measures which can benefit from temporal scalability. Targeting on applications that requires frequent interactivity, we propose a transcoding scheme that fully utilizes the benefits of Switching P and Switching I frames specified in H.264 to enhance video stream's temporal scalability.  Focusing on visual quality related factors, a series of carefully designed subjective quality assessment tests have been performed on mobile devices to investigate the effects of multi-dimensional scalability on human quality perception. Our study reveals that QoE degrades non-monotonically with bitrate and that scaling order preferences are content-dependent. Another study find out that the flickering effect caused by frequent switching between layers in SVC compliant bit-streams is highly related to the switching period. When the period is above a certain threshold, the flickering effect will disappear and layer switching should not be considered as harmful. We have also examined user perceived video quality in 3D virtual worlds. Our results show that the avatars' distance to the virtual screen in 3D worlds contribute significant to the video QoE, i.e., for a wide extent of distortion, there exists always a feasible virtual distance from where the distortion is not detectable for most of people, which makes sense to perform video adaptation.</p><p>The work presented in this thesis is supposed to help improving the design of self adaptive video streaming services that can deliver video content independently of network technology and end-device capability while seeking the best possible experience for video.</p> / Ardendo småföretagsdoktorand

Video compression is an essential component of present-day applications and a decisive factor between the success or failure of a business model. There is an ever increasing demand to transmit larger number of superior-quality video channels into the available transmission bandwidth. Consumers are increasingly discerning about the quality and performance of video-based products and there is therefore a strong incentive for continuous improvement in video coding technology for companies to have market edge over its competitors. Even though processor speeds and network bandwidths continue to increase, a better video compression results in a more competitive product. This drive to improve video compression technology has led to a revolution in the last decade. In this thesis we addresses some of these data compression problems in a practical multimedia system that employ Hybrid video coding schemes. Typically Real life video signals show non-stationary statistical behavior. The statistics of these signals largely depend on the video content and the acquisition process. Hybrid video coding schemes like H264/AVC exploits some of the non-stationary characteristics but certainly not all of it. Moreover, higher order statistical dependencies on a syntax element level are mostly neglected in existing video coding schemes. Designing a video coding scheme for a video coder by taking into consideration these typically observed statistical properties, however, offers room for significant improvements in coding efficiency.In this thesis work a new frequency domain curve-fitting compression framework is proposed as an extension to H264 Context Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coder (CABAC) that achieves better compression efficiency at reduced complexity. The proposed Curve-Fitting extension to H264 CABAC, henceforth called as CF-CABAC, is modularly designed to conveniently fit into existing block based H264 Hybrid video Entropy coding algorithms. Traditionally there have been many proposals in the literature to fuse surfaces/curve fitting with Block-based, Region based, Training-based (VQ, fractals) compression algorithms primarily to exploiting pixel- domain redundancies. Though the compression efficiency of these are expectantly better than DCT transform based compression, but their main drawback is the high computational demand which make the former techniques non-competitive for real-time applications over the latter. The curve fitting techniques proposed so far have been on the pixel domain. The video characteristic on the pixel domain are highly non-stationary making curve fitting techniques not very efficient in terms of video quality, compression ratio and complexity. In this thesis, we explore using curve fitting techniques to Quantized frequency domain coefficients. we fuse this powerful technique to H264 CABAC Entropy coding. Based on some predictable characteristics of Quantized DCT coefficients, a computationally in-expensive curve fitting technique is explored that fits into the existing H264 CABAC framework. Also Due to the lossy nature of video compression and the strong demand for bandwidth and computation resources in a multimedia system, one of the key design issues for video coding is to optimize trade-off among quality (distortion) vs compression (rate) vs complexity. This thesis also briefly studies the existing rate distortion (RD) optimization approaches proposed to video coding for exploring the best RD performance of a video codec. Further, we propose a graph based algorithm for Rate-distortion. optimization of quantized coefficient indices for the proposed CF-CABAC entropy coding.

Video compression is an essential component of present-day applications and a decisive factor between the success or failure of a business model. There is an ever increasing demand to transmit larger number of superior-quality video channels into the available transmission bandwidth. Consumers are increasingly discerning about the quality and performance of video-based products and there is therefore a strong incentive for continuous improvement in video coding technology for companies to have market edge over its competitors. Even though processor speeds and network bandwidths continue to increase, a better video compression results in a more competitive product. This drive to improve video compression technology has led to a revolution in the last decade. In this thesis we addresses some of these data compression problems in a practical multimedia system that employ Hybrid video coding schemes. Typically Real life video signals show non-stationary statistical behavior. The statistics of these signals largely depend on the video content and the acquisition process. Hybrid video coding schemes like H264/AVC exploits some of the non-stationary characteristics but certainly not all of it. Moreover, higher order statistical dependencies on a syntax element level are mostly neglected in existing video coding schemes. Designing a video coding scheme for a video coder by taking into consideration these typically observed statistical properties, however, offers room for significant improvements in coding efficiency.In this thesis work a new frequency domain curve-fitting compression framework is proposed as an extension to H264 Context Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coder (CABAC) that achieves better compression efficiency at reduced complexity. The proposed Curve-Fitting extension to H264 CABAC, henceforth called as CF-CABAC, is modularly designed to conveniently fit into existing block based H264 Hybrid video Entropy coding algorithms. Traditionally there have been many proposals in the literature to fuse surfaces/curve fitting with Block-based, Region based, Training-based (VQ, fractals) compression algorithms primarily to exploiting pixel- domain redundancies. Though the compression efficiency of these are expectantly better than DCT transform based compression, but their main drawback is the high computational demand which make the former techniques non-competitive for real-time applications over the latter. The curve fitting techniques proposed so far have been on the pixel domain. The video characteristic on the pixel domain are highly non-stationary making curve fitting techniques not very efficient in terms of video quality, compression ratio and complexity. In this thesis, we explore using curve fitting techniques to Quantized frequency domain coefficients. we fuse this powerful technique to H264 CABAC Entropy coding. Based on some predictable characteristics of Quantized DCT coefficients, a computationally in-expensive curve fitting technique is explored that fits into the existing H264 CABAC framework. Also Due to the lossy nature of video compression and the strong demand for bandwidth and computation resources in a multimedia system, one of the key design issues for video coding is to optimize trade-off among quality (distortion) vs compression (rate) vs complexity. This thesis also briefly studies the existing rate distortion (RD) optimization approaches proposed to video coding for exploring the best RD performance of a video codec. Further, we propose a graph based algorithm for Rate-distortion. optimization of quantized coefficient indices for the proposed CF-CABAC entropy coding.

To provide universal multimedia experience, multimedia streaming services need to transparently handle the variation and heterogeneity in operating environment. From the standpoint of streaming application, video adaptation techniques are intended to cope with the environmental variations by utilizing manipulations of the video content itself. Scalable video coding (SVC) schemes, like that suggested by the standards H.264 and its SVC extension, is highly attractive for designing a self-adaptive video streaming system. When SVC is employed in streaming system, the produced video stream can be then easily truncated or tailored to form several sub-streams which can be decoded separately to obtain a range of preferable picture size, quality and frame rate. However, questions about how to perform the adaptation using SVC and how much adaptation SVC enables are still remaining research issues. We still lack a thorough understanding of how to automate the scaling procedure in order to achieve an optimal video Quality-of-Experience for end users. Video QoE, depends highly on human perception. In this thesis, we introduce several video QoE studies around the usability of H.264 SVC. Several factors that contribute significantly to the overall QoEs have been identified and evaluated in these studies. As an example of application usage related factor, playback smoothness and application response time are critical performance measures which can benefit from temporal scalability. Targeting on applications that requires frequent interactivity, we propose a transcoding scheme that fully utilizes the benefits of Switching P and Switching I frames specified in H.264 to enhance video stream's temporal scalability.  Focusing on visual quality related factors, a series of carefully designed subjective quality assessment tests have been performed on mobile devices to investigate the effects of multi-dimensional scalability on human quality perception. Our study reveals that QoE degrades non-monotonically with bitrate and that scaling order preferences are content-dependent. Another study find out that the flickering effect caused by frequent switching between layers in SVC compliant bit-streams is highly related to the switching period. When the period is above a certain threshold, the flickering effect will disappear and layer switching should not be considered as harmful. We have also examined user perceived video quality in 3D virtual worlds. Our results show that the avatars' distance to the virtual screen in 3D worlds contribute significant to the video QoE, i.e., for a wide extent of distortion, there exists always a feasible virtual distance from where the distortion is not detectable for most of people, which makes sense to perform video adaptation. The work presented in this thesis is supposed to help improving the design of self adaptive video streaming services that can deliver video content independently of network technology and end-device capability while seeking the best possible experience for video. / Ardendo småföretagsdoktorand

Submitted by Fabio Sobreira Campos da Costa (fabio.sobreira@ufpe.br) on 2016-06-21T15:14:55Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Vitor_de_Andrade_Coutinho-dissertacao_ppgee.pdf: 3622975 bytes, checksum: 01a22e0302dfc1890d745c6b1bffe327 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-21T15:14:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Vitor_de_Andrade_Coutinho-dissertacao_ppgee.pdf: 3622975 bytes, checksum: 01a22e0302dfc1890d745c6b1bffe327 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-02-23 / CNPq / O presente trabalho aborda o desenvolvimento de aproximações para a transformada dis- reta do osseno (DCT) utilizando a abordagem pruning. Devido à propriedade da ompa ta- ção de energia, a DCT é empregada em diversas apli ações de ompressão de dados. Embora algoritmos rápidos permitam omputar a DCT e ientemente, operações de multipli ação são inevitáveis. Devido a res ente demanda por métodos de baixo onsumo energéti o, novos algoritmos de usto omputa ional reduzido são ne essários. Neste ontexto, aproximações para a DCT foram propostas nos últimos anos. Tais aproximações permitem algoritmos livres de multipli ação, sem a ne essidade de operações de ponto utuante, mantendo o desempe- nho de ompressão omparável ao forne ido por métodos baseados na DCT. Uma abordagem adi ional para reduzir o usto omputa ional da DCT é a utilização de pruning. Tal té ni a onsiste em não onsiderar oe ientes dos vetores de entrada e/ou saída que apresentam menor relevân ia em termos de energia on entrada. No aso da DCT, esses oe ientes são os termos de mais alta frequên ia do vetor transformado. A apli ação de pruning a aproxima- ções para a DCT é uma área pou o explorada. O objetivo deste trabalho é apli ar a té ni a a diferentes métodos aproximados para a DCT. As transformações resultantes foram apli adas no ontexto de ompressão de imagem e vídeo e os resultados mostraram desempenho ompa- rável ao de métodos exatos a um usto omputa ional bastante reduzido. Uma generalização do on eito é apresentada, assim omo uma análise da omplexidade aritméti a. / This work introdu es approximate dis rete osine transforms (DCT) based on the pruning approa h. Due to the energy ompa tion property, the DCT is employed in several data ompression appli ations. Although fast algorithms allow an e ient DCT omputation, multipli ation operations are inevitable. Due to the in reasing demand for energy e ient methods, new algorithms with redu ed omputational ost are required. In this ontext, DCT approximations have been proposed re ently. Su h approximations allow multipli ation free algorithms whi h an avoid oating point operations, while maintaining a ompetitive performan e. A further approa h to redu e the omputational ost of the DCT is pruning. The te hnique onsists of dis arding input and/or output ve tors oe ients whi h are regarded as less signi ant. In the ase of the DCT, su h oe ients are output oe ients asso iated to higher frequen y terms. Pruned DCT approximations is a relatively unexplored eld of resear h. The obje tive of this work is the ombination of approximations and pruning to derive extremely low- omplexity DCT approximations. The resulting methods were applied in the image and vídeo ompression s enario and results showed omparative performan e with exa t methods at a mu h lower omputational omplexity. A qualitative and quantitative omparison with a omprehensive list of existing methods is presented. A generalization of the pruning on ept is presented.