TEXAS ENGINEERING EXP. STA. XIONG, ZIXIANG
This ambitious project explores several new directions in the algorithmic design and architecture of challenging multimedia communication systems. A unified approach is taken for transmission of multimedia data over heterogeneous networks (e.g., the Internet) and noisy channels (e.g., a wireless LAN) based on scalable source coding. Topics covered in the project are:
1) Scalable multimedia data compression based on efficient arithmetic coding of bit planes of transform coefficients. For image coding, the wavelet transform is used like in the new JPEG-2000 standard. The focus is on introducing progressiveness in the traditionally non-progressive trellis coded quantization scheme. The 3-D wavelet transform is adopted for fully scalable video coding. A new nonuniform modulated complex lapped transform (NMCLT) is applied for audio coding. To achieve high arithmetic coding performance, a significant amount of effort is invested in high-order context modeling of the NMCLT or wavelet coefficients. In addition, new methods are studied for masking quantization noise of the NMCLT coefficients for audio coding and exploring the motion information for 3-D wavelet video coding.
2) Scalable transmission of Internet multimedia via optimal packetization and joint congestion and error control. A dynamic programming based optimal packetization scheme for scalable multimedia bit streams is studied. Suboptimal but low complexity packetization schemes are also investigated. Congestion control is used to determine the available transmission rate and an end-to-end optimal error control scheme devised to mitigate the effects of pack loss. This is achieved by optimally trading off scalable source coding and unequal error protection.
