Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2004. / "Submitted to Department of Computer Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy" Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-158)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 1998. / Includes vita. Bibliography: leaves 139-143.

The recent advances in sensor and display technologies have brought upon the High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging capability. The modern multiple exposure HDR sensors can achieve the dynamic range of 100-120 dB and LED and OLED display devices have contrast ratios of 10^5:1 to 10^6:1. Despite the above advances in technology the image/video compression algorithms and associated hardware are yet based on Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) technology, i.e. they operate within an effective dynamic range of up to 70 dB for 8 bit gamma corrected images. Further the existing infrastructure for content distribution is also designed for SDR, which creates interoperability problems with true HDR capture and display equipment. The current solutions for the above problem include tone mapping the HDR content to fit SDR. However this approach leads to image quality associated problems, when strong dynamic range compression is applied. Even though some HDR-only solutions have been proposed in literature, they are not interoperable with current SDR infrastructure and are thus typically used in closed systems. Given the above observations a research gap was identified in the need for efficient algorithms for the compression of still images and video, which are capable of storing full dynamic range and colour gamut of HDR images and at the same time backward compatible with existing SDR infrastructure. To improve the usability of SDR content it is vital that any such algorithms should accommodate different tone mapping operators, including those that are spatially non-uniform. In the course of the research presented in this thesis a novel two layer CODEC architecture is introduced for both HDR image and video coding. Further a universal and computationally efficient approximation of the tone mapping operator is developed and presented. It is shown that the use of perceptually uniform colourspaces for internal representation of pixel data enables improved compression efficiency of the algorithms. Further proposed novel approaches to the compression of metadata for the tone mapping operator is shown to improve compression performance for low bitrate video content. Multiple compression algorithms are designed, implemented and compared and quality-complexity trade-offs are identified. Finally practical aspects of implementing the developed algorithms are explored by automating the design space exploration flow and integrating the high level systems design framework with domain specific tools for synthesis and simulation of multiprocessor systems. The directions for further work are also presented.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Electrical Engineering Department, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-52).

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 223-249.

3D video is a technology that has seen a tremendous attention in the recent years. Multiview Video Coding (MVC) is an extension of the popular H.264 video coding standard and is commonly used to compress 3D videos. It offers an improvement of 20% to 50% in compression efficiency over simulcast encoding of multiview videos using the conventional H.264 video coding standard. However, there are two important problems associated with it: (i) its superior compression performance comes at the cost of significantly higher computational complexity which hampers the real-world realization of MVC encoder in applications such as 3D live broadcasting and interactive Free Viewpoint Television (FTV), and (ii) compressed 3D videos can suffer from packet loss during transmission, which can degrade the viewing quality of the 3D video at the decoder. This thesis aims to solve these problems by presenting techniques to reduce the computational complexity of the MVC encoder and by proposing a consistent error concealment technique for frame losses in 3D video transmission. The thesis first analyses the complexity of the MVC encoder. It then proposes two novel techniques to reduce the complexity of motion and disparity estimation. The first method achieves complexity reduction in the disparity estimation process by exploiting the relationship between temporal levels, type of macroblocks and search ranges while the second method achieves it by exploiting the geometrical relation- ship between motion and disparity vectors in stereo frames. These two methods are then combined with other state-of-the-art methods in a unique framework where gains add up. Experimental results show that the proposed low-complexity framework can reduce the encoding time of the standard MVC encoder by over 93% while maintaining similar compression efficiency performance. The addition of new View Synthesis Prediction (VSP) modes to the MVC encoding framework improves the compression efficiency of MVC. However, testing additional modes comes at the cost of increased encoding complexity. In order to reduce the encoding complexity, the thesis, next, proposes a bayesian early mode decision technique for a VSP enhanced MVC coder. It exploits the statistical similarities between the RD costs of the VSP SKIP mode in neighbouring views to terminate the mode decision process early. Results indicate that the proposed technique can reduce the encoding time of the enhanced MVC coder by over 33% at similar compression efficiency levels. Finally, compressed 3D videos are usually required to be broadcast to a large number of users where transmission errors can lead to frame losses which can degrade the video quality at the decoder. A simple reconstruction of the lost frames can lead to inconsistent reconstruction of the 3D scene which may negatively affect the viewing experience of a user. In order to solve this problem, the thesis proposes, at the end, a consistency model for recovering frames lost during transmission. The proposed consistency model is used to evaluate inter-view and temporal consistencies while selecting candidate blocks for concealment. Experimental results show that the proposed technique is able to recover the lost frames with high consistency and better quality than two standard error concealment methods and a baseline technique based on the boundary matching algorithm.

Pas de résumé en français / No summary

L'objectif de cette thèse est la conception d'une plateforme de compression vidéo de nouvelle génération à haut degré d'adaptation vis-à-vis de l'environnement. Ce besoin d'adaptabilité a plusieurs origines. D'une part les systèmes actuels visent à s'adapter à la diversité et l'hétérogénéité des médias et des terminaux actuels. D'autre part, l'exploitation de l'information contenue dans une scène vidéo dépend de l'application visée et des besoins des utilisateurs. Ainsi, l'information peut être exploitée de manière complètement inhomogène spatialement ou temporellement. En effet, l'exploitation spatiale de la scène peut être irrégulière par définition, par la définition automatique ou manuelle de zones d'intérêts dans l'image. La qualité de la vidéo, donc de la compression, doit pouvoir s'adapter afin de limiter la quantité de donnée à transmettre. Cette qualité est donc dépendante de l'évolution de la scène vidéo elle-même. Une architecture matérielle configurable a été proposée dans cette thèse permettant de supporter différents algorithmes de recherche en offrant une précision subpixélique.La synthèse des travaux menés dans ce domaine et la comparaison objective des résultats obtenus par rapport à l'état de l'art. L'architecture proposée est synthétisée à base d'un FPGA Virtex 6 FPGA, les résultats obtenus pourraient traiter l'estimation du mouvement pixélique avec un flux vidéo haute définition (HD 1080), respectivement à 13 images par seconde en utilisant la stratégie de recherche exhaustive (108K Macroblocs/s) et jusqu'à 223 images par seconde avec la recherche selon un grille en diamant (1,8 M Macroblocs /s). En outre le raffinement subpixélique en quart-pel est réalisé à Macroblocs 232k/ s

This thesis deals with possible and realized decompression and playing of video on platforms, using FPGA unit. For implementation of this player is used platform FITKit, which has integrated VGA connector and large enough RAM memory. It uses a hard drive as memory medium with FAT32 file system.