• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.498-512
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• 2010

Intra coding is an indispensable coding tool since it can provide random accessibility as well as error resiliency. However, it is the problem that intra coding has relatively low coding efficiency compared with inter coding in the area of video coding. Even though H.264/AVC has significantly improved the intra coding performance compared with previous video standards, H.264/AVC encoder complexity is significantly increased, which is not suitable for low bit rate interactive services. In this paper, a Voting-based Intra Mode Bit Skip (V-IMBS) scheme is proposed to improve coding efficiency as well as to reduce encoding time complexity using decoder-side prediction. In case that the decoder can determine the same prediction mode as what is chosen by the encoder, the encoder does not send that intra prediction mode; otherwise, the conventional H.264/AVC intra coding is performed. Simulation results reveal a performance increase up to 4.44% overall rate savings and 0.24 dB in peak signal-to-noise ratio while the frame encoding speed of proposed method is about 42.8% better than that of H.264/AVC.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Industry Society
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.123-130
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• 2004

In this paper, an advanced error tracking algorithm by using feedback channel was proposed for error resilient transmission. Using this proposed algorithm, the propagation of errors were reduced within the decoded data over bit error prone network. The addresses of corrupted blocks are reported to encoder by decoder. With negative acknowledgments of feedback channel, the encoder can precisely calculate negative acknowledgments and track the propagated errors by examining the backward motion dependency for proper pixel in the current encoding frame. The error-propagation effects can be terminated completely by INTRA refreshing the affected macro-blocks by using proposed error tracking algorithm. By utilizing the selective four-corner error tracking approximation, the error tracking computations of the proposed algorithm is less than that of the algorithm using full pixel without substantial degradation in video quality. The proposed algorithm can track errors rapidly and accurately.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.5
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• pp.1-9
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• 2010

In this paper, the novel architecture of Intra-prediction & DCTQ hardware, which can process for the Full HD image($1980{\times}1088$@30fps) in realtime, is proposed. The cycle optimization method for the overall cycle of prediction, transform, scaling, descaling, and reconstruction is proposed. To reduce the cycle in the $4{\times}4$ prediction, the quantization process is performed during the prediction cycle and pre-selection of 2 modes among the 9 modes is performed to reduce the hardware area. To reduce the hardware of $16{\times}16$ and $8{\times}8$ prediction, the sharing logic between 2 prediction is utilized. The proposed architecture can process the 30frame/sec of full HD image in 108 MHz clock and operate 425 cycle for one macroblock.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.836-846
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• 2014

To expedite UHD (Ultra High Definition) video service, the HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding) technology has recently been standardized and it achieves two times higher compression efficiency than the conventional H.264/AVC. To obtain the improved efficiency, however, it employs many complex methods which need complicated calculation, thereby resulting in a significantly increased computational complexity when compared to that of H.264/AVC. For example, to improve the coding efficiency of intra frame coding, up to 35 intra prediction modes are defined in HEVC, but this results in an increased encoding time than the H.264/AVC. In this paper, we propose a fast intra prediction mode decision scheme which reduces computational complexity by changing the number of intra prediction mode in accordance with the percentage of PU sizes for a given video resolution, and by classifying the 35 intra prediction modes into 4 categories considering video resolution and quantization parameter. The experimental results show that the total encoding time is reduced by about 7% on average at the cost of only 2% increase in BD-rate.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.4C
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• pp.391-399
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• 2006

We propose a novel low complexity video encoder, at the expense of a complex decoder, where video frames are intra-coded periodically and frames in between successive intra-coded frames are coded efficiently using a proposed irregular binning technique. We investigate a method of forming an irregular binning which is capable of quantizing any value effectively with only small number of bins, by exploiting the correlation between successive frames. This correlation is additionally exploited at the decoder, where the quality of reconstructed frames is enhanced gradually by applying POCS(projection on the convex sets). After an image frame is reconstructed with the irregular binning information at the proposed decoder, we can further improve the resulting quality by modifying the reconstructed image with motion-compensated image components from the neighboring frames which are considered to contain image details. In the proposed decoder, several iterations of these modification and re-projection steps can be invoked. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed coding scheme is comparable to that of H.264/AVC coding in m mode. Since the proposed video coding does not require motion estimation at the encoder, it can be considered as an alternative for some versions of H.264/AVC in applications requiring a simple encoder.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.29-36
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• 2009

The packet loss and the disconnection during handoff are the most critical problems which degrade the video quality in wireless video streaming. To cope with these problems, we propose an efficient video streaming method in this paper, which does not only dynamically adjust the video transmission rate based on the raptor forward error correction (FEC) level, but also minimize the error propagation during handoff. Firstly, the channel bandwidth of the wireless broadband internet, called WiBro, is estimated by analyzing channel parameters including the carrier to interference and noise ratio (CINR) and the handoff. Secondly, the streaming server adjusts the next transmission rate according to the estimated channel bandwidth and the raptor FEC level to avoid packet error. Also, the encoder performs the intra refresh method that inserts an intra frame (I-frame) right after handoff to reduce the error propagation effectively. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can improve the performance of the video streaming over WiBro network.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.58-66
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• 2009

Recently the emerging demands of the light-video encoder promotes lots of research efforts on DVC (Distributed Video Coding). As an appropriate video compression method, DVC has been studied, and Wyner-Ziv (WZ) video compression is its one representative structure. The WZ encoder splits the image into two kinds of frames, one is key frame which is compressed by conventional intra coding, and the other is WZ frame which is encoded by WZ coding. The WZ decoder decodes the key frame first, and estimates the WZ frame using temporal correlation between key frames. Estimated WZ frame (Side Information) cannot be the same as the original WZ frame due to the absence of the WZ frame information at decoder. As a result, the difference between the estimated and original WZ frames are regarded as virtual channel noise. The WZ frame is reconstructed by removing noise in side information. Therefore precise noise estimation produces good performance gain in WZ video compression by improving error correcting capability by channel code. But noise cannot be estimated precisely at WZ decoder unless there is good WZ frame information, and generally it is estimated from the difference of corresponding key frames. Also the estimated noise is limited by comparing with frame level noise to reduce the uncertainty of the estimation method. However these methods cannot provide good noise estimation for every frame or each bit plane. In this paper, we propose a noise nodel selection method which chooses a better noise model for each bit plane after generating candidate noise models. Experimental result shows PSNR gain up to 0.8 dB.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.310-318
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• 2008

The H.264/AVC standard achieves higher coding efficiency than previous video coding standards with the rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique which selects the best coding mode and reference frame for each macroblock. As a result, the complexity of the encoder have been significantly increased. In this paper, a fast intra-mode decision algorithm is proposed to reduce the computational load of intra-mode search, which is based on the inverse tree-structure edge prediction algorithm. First, we obtained the dominant edge for each $4{\times}4$ block from local edge information, then the RDO process is only performed by the mode which corresponds to dominant edge direction. Then, for the $8{\times}8$ (or $16{\times}16$) block stage, the dominant edge is calculated from its four $4{\times}4$ (or $16{\times}16$) blocks' dominant edges without additional calculation and the RDO process is also performed by the mode which is related to dominant edge direction. Experimental results show that proposed scheme can significantly improve the speed of the intra prediction with a negligible loss in the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and a little increase of bits.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.341-348
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• 2016

HEVC is the next compression standard and is expected to be used widely replacing the conventional H.264/AVC standard. The compression ratio of the HEVC is twice times than H.264/AVC, whereas its computational complexity is increased by up to 40%. Many research efforts have been made to reduce the computational complexity and to speed up encoding. For intra coding, the rough mode decision (RMD) is commonly applied. The rate-distortion optimization (RDO) process to decide the best mode is too complex so that RMD chooses the candidate modes with a simple process and sends the candidates to RDO process. However, for large-size blocks, the RMD also requires considerable computations. In this paper, a down-sampling scheme is proposed for the RMD process. The reference pixel loading, predicted pixel generation are performed using the down-sampled pixel data. When the proposed scheme is applied to the RMD, the computational complexity is reduced by 70% with a marginal bitrate increase of 0.04%. In terms of area of hardware-based RMD, the gate count and the buffer size is reduced 33% and 66%, respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.6
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• pp.66-74
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• 2010

Recently distributed video coding (DVC) is spotlighted for the environment which has restriction in computing resource at encoder. Wyner-Ziv (WZ) coding is a representative scheme of DVC. The WZ encoder independently encodes key frame and WZ frame respectively by conventional intra coding and channel code. WZ decoder generates side information from reconstructed two key frames (t-1, t+1) based on temporal correlation. The side information is regarded as a noisy version of original WZ frame. Virtual channel noise can be removed by channel decoding process. So the performance of WZ coding greatly depends on the performance of channel code. Among existing channel codes, Turbo code and LDPC code have the most powerful error correction capability. These channel codes use stochastically iterative decoding process. However the iterative decoding process is quite time-consuming, so complexity of WZ decoder is considerably increased. Analysis of the complexity of LPDCA with real video data shows that the portion of complexity of LDPCA decoding is higher than 60% in total WZ decoding complexity. Using the HDA (Hard Decision Aided) method proposed in channel code area, channel decoding complexity can be much reduced. But considerable RD performance loss is possible according to different thresholds and its proper value is different for each sequence. In this paper, we propose an adaptive HDA method which sets up a proper threshold according to sequence. The proposed method shows about 62% and 32% of time saving, respectively in LDPCA and WZ decoding process, while RD performance is not that decreased.