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Improved Update Step for Scalable Video Coding in Video Surveillance

Fengling Li¹, Nam Ling¹ and Xiaokang Yang²

(1)	Department of Computer Engineering, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053, USA

(2)	Institute of Image Communication and Information Processing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200030, China

Received: 16 August 2005 Revised: 30 November 2005 Accepted: 14 March 2006 Published online: 10 August 2007

Abstract Many evolving video services and applications for intelligent security systems require reliable transmission of high quality video to diverse clients over heterogeneous networks using available system resources. Scalable video coding (SVC) is one of the emerging video compression technologies with such potential capabilities. Advances in lifting-based motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) have enabled highly efficient and flexible spatial, temporal, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and complexity scalability to be realized over a wide range of bit rates. In this paper, we present an algorithm to improve the update step of MCTF, which serves as an important informative step for the coding performance of SVC. A novel update-step algorithm, which takes advantage of the chrominance information of the video sequence and the correlation of the motion vectors (MVs) of the neighboring blocks as well as the correlation of the derived update MVs in the low-pass frames, is proposed to improve update step of MCTF by (1) computing correct update motion information, (2) generating correct amount of energy contained in the high-pass frames. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the quality of the reconstructed video sequence in visual quality.

Keywords scalable video coding (SVC) - motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) - motion vector (MV) correlation - prediction and update step

Fengling Li (Corresponding author)
Email: f1li@scu.edu

Nam Ling
Email: nling@scu.edu

Xiaokang Yang
Email: xkyang@sjtu.edu.cn

Fengling Li received the M. S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering in 2000 and 2006, respectively from Snata Clara University, USA. From 2000 to 2002, she worked at Streaming21, Inc., Los Gatos, CA, USA, as a software engineer. Currently, she is a patent engineer at Fenwick & West LLP. Her research interests include video compression and communications, motion estimation, scalable video coding, and their multimedia applications.

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Nam Ling received a B. Eng. degree in electrical engineering from Singapore. He received M. S. and Ph.D. degrees, both in computer engineering, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Louisiana, USA. Prof. Ling is currently a full Professor with the Department of Computer Engineering and the Associate Dean (Graduate Studies and Research) for the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University (SCU), California, USA. Prof. Ling is also a Consulting Professor and Honorary Advisor to the National University of Singapore.

Prof. Ling has more than 130 publications in the fields of image/video coding, video decoder design, video streaming, and systolic arrays. He is the primary author of the book entitled Specification and Verification of Systolic Arrays. Prof. Ling received the Arthur Vining Davis Junior Faculty Fellowship in 1991 and the SCU Outstanding Achievement Award in Teaching, Research, and Service, in 1992. Prof. Ling was named 1999 Researcher of the Year by SCU Engineering. He received the SCU Award for Recent Achievement in Scholarship in 2002 and the SCU President’s Recognition Award in 2005. He was named IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (Circuits and Systems) for the years 2002–2003 and 2007–2008. Prof. Ling also received the 2003 IEEE ICCE Best Paper Award. He and his team’s proposals on fast motion estimation methods were adopted into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding international standard in 2005 and 2006.

Prof. Ling served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I in 2002–2003. He was a Guest Co-editor for the Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems. In 1993–1995, Prof. Ling served as the Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee (TC) on Microprocessors and Microcomputers. Currently he serves as a member in several IEEE technical committees (TCs)—the VSPC TC, the CASCOM TC (as Chair; both IEEE CAS Society), and the DISPS TC (IEEE SP Society). Prof. Ling was the General Chair of the IEEE Hot Chips Symposium in 1995. He served as Technical Program Chair/Co-Chair for DCV’02, SiPS’00, ISCAS’07 and SiPS’07. He was a Track Co-Chair for ISCAS’04-06. Prof. Ling served on editorial boards, in program committees, organizing committees, and as session chairs for many IEEE journals/conferences. He holds senior/professional memberships in IEEE, SPIE, and ASEE.

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Yang Xiaokang received the B. S. degree from Xiamen University, Xiamen, China, in 1994, the M. S. degree from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China, in 1997, and the Ph.D. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai China, in 2000. From September 2000 to March 2002, he worked as a Research Fellow in the Centre for Signal Processing, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. From April 2002 to October 2004, he was a Research Scientist at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R), Singapore.

He is currently a full professor and the director assistant of the Institute of Image Communication and Information Processing, Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. He has published over 70 refereed papers, and has filed six patents. His current research interests include networked multimedia processing, media retrieval, perceptual visual processing, digital television, and pattern recognition. He actively participates in the International Standards such as MPEG-4, JVT, and MPEG-21.

He received the Best Young Investigator Paper Award at IS&T/SPIE International Conference on Video Communication and Image Processing (VCIP2003) and awards from A-STAR and Tan Kah Kee foundations. He was currently a senior member of IEEE, and a member of Visual Signal Processing and Communications Technical Committee of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He was the special session chair of Perceptual Visual Processing of IEEE ICME2006 and served as the technical program co-chair of IEEE SiPS2007.

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Improved Update Step for Scalable Video Coding in Video Surveillance

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