Signal and Image Processing Seminar

Low Bit Rate H.263+ Video Coding: Efficiency, Scalability and Error Resilience

Prof. Faouzi Kossentini
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canad

faouzi@ee.ubc.ca

Friday, July 31, 2:00-3:00 PM, ENS 302

Talk in PowerPoint and PDF formats

Abstract

H.263 version 2 (a.k.a. H.263+) is the latest video coding standard designed mainly for applications involving low bit rate video communication in mostly error-prone environments, such as video conferencing, video e-mailing and video telephony. In this presentation, we discuss briefly the H.263 standard including its four optional modes, as well as its second version's twelve new negotiable modes. We then present a discussion on three related projects involving 1) coding efficiency, 2) scalability and 3) error resilience. In the first project, we develop efficient motion estimation, DCT prediction and quantization algorithms, as well as MMX mapping techniques, that allow real-time coding of QCIF video sequences on a Pentium/MMX 200 Mhz PC. The second project introduces SNR and/or spatially scalable video coding algorithms in a rate-distortion optimized framework, yielding near-optimal compression performance for scalable bit streams. In the third project, we develop synchronization, error concealment and multiple description video coding algorithms, leading to better error resilience for packet-lossy networks. We conclude with a discussion on current H.263 standardization activities and related research directions.

Biography

Faouzi Kossentini received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1989, 1990, and 1994, respectively. He is presently an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, where he is involved in research in the areas of signal processing, communications and multimedia, and more specifically in subband/wavelet image transformation, quantization, audiovisual signal compression and coding, channel error resilience, joint source and channel coding, image and video communication and image analysis. He has co-authored more than seventy journal papers, conference papers, book chapters and patents. Dr. Kossentini has been active as a voting member, and recently as a head of delegation, of the Canadian delegate to the international multimedia standardization committee ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC29. Moreover, he has participated in most current JBIG/JPEG, MPEG-4 and H.263 standardization activities. Dr. Kossentini is a member of the IEEE. He has served as a session chair for ICASSP-96 and as a technical area coordinator for ICIP-97. He is currently an associate editor for the IEEE transactions on image processing, and he is a technical program chairman for ICIP-2000.

A list of digital signal processing seminars is available at from the ECE department Web pages under "Seminars". The Web address for the digital signal processing seminars is http://anchovy.ece.utexas.edu/seminars