Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Within the next few years, a convergence of wireless and wired audio-visual services is expected, and, at the same time, phenomenal growth in the number of mobile video and IPTV users. These services will represent an important source of revenue for their operators and providers, and video coding and transcoding will play a key role in these and other services to enable them to function with heterogeneous terminals and networks. However, the growing popularity of video is putting heavy and growing pressure on our information technology (IT) infrastructures, in terms of computational complexity, bandwidth and storage requirements. This project will address these problems by investigating novel technologies applied to H.264 and HEVC in two video research areas. In the first research area, we will work towards improving the visual quality of videos: perceptual distortion rate optimization methods based on novel low-complexity high-accuracy visual quality metrics, near-optimal frame level video coding parameter estimation using machine learning, and a rate control algorithm (based on recent distortion models) giving consistent frame-to-frame quality. In the second area, we will work towards reducing the computational complexity of video coding and transcoding operations: efficient video transcoding exploiting the source's motion vectors, coding modes and residual information for H.264 to HEVC transcoding, novel multi-stream video encoder/transcoder based on motion fields and rate-distortion (R-D) models, and HEVC encoding on massively parallel processors. Solving these problems will contribute to a smooth and cost-effective deployment of next generation video applications and services. This is very important to the Canadian telecommunications industry (especially mobile operators and IPTV service providers, such as cable operators) and crucial to the success of their next generation multimedia applications and services. Finally, it will contribute to strengthening the technological leadership in the transcoding field of Vantrix, a Canadian company and world leader in video optimization and delivery solutions.