The area of digital image and video compression and communications has seen growing activity in recent years, including standardization efforts such as JPEG and MPEG, and an increased number of current or proposed applications from Cable or Satellite TV to videoconferencing and future multimedia services. This trend will continue to create an incentive for new compression techniques that are more efficient as well as better adapted to the particular transmission environments. The main thrust of this research is to provide adaptive compression techniques for video communications. Adaptive techniques are those where encoders are capable of matching their encoding procedure to the local characteristics of the source or the channel. Rate-distortion optimal solutions and fast heuristic approximations are being obtained for some of the problems of interest in video communications, such as bit allocation and rate control. A novel scalar adaptive quantizer, close in spirit to arithmetic coding, is being investigated. This new technique, combined with such popular quantization techniques as trellis coded quantization, will be used in real encoding situations. Convergence and asymptotic properties of this scheme are also being studied. For variable channel situations where transmission resources are shared, as in ATM networks for instance, rate constraints for each video connection are being designed to enable good individual video quality as well as efficient overall network utilization. This research is being carried out in the Digital Video Communications research laboratory that is currently being set up within the Signal and Image Processing Institute. Our main education goal is to provide teaching in the area of signal, image and video processing. We will introduce a digital video communications course, designed to cover material that is specific of video compression including the relevant communications aspects, and to provide hands-on experience for the students .
