Grant: Idea to Innovation

The demand for high-performance network video communications has been increasing exponentially in recent years. According to Cisco Visual Networking Index, ""the sum of all forms of video (TV, VoD, Internet, and P2P) will continue to be approximately 90 percent of global consumer traffic by 2015"". Whether the gap between consumer expectations and available video compression technologies can be filled in a timely manner would be a critical issue in the next 5-10 years for Canadian multimedia industry to survive the competition in the fast-evolving global market. An important aspect that has often been badly accounted for in current video compression systems is that human eyes are the ultimate receivers of the video content. Among existing objective perceptual image quality assessment methods, the structural similarity (SSIM) index achieves an excellent comprise between quality prediction accuracy and computational complexity. The objective of the proposed project is to develop a novel prototype product of perceptual video encoder optimized for perceptual quality measured based on the SSIM index. The goal is to improve SSIM-based perceptual quality of decoded video without increasing data rate, or to reduce the data rate of compressed video stream without sacrificing SSIM-based quality evaluation. The developed prototype software product can be employed in various video encoder products and be deployed through a broad range of video service providers who supply video-on-demand (VoD), video broadcasting, videoconferencing, HDTV, Internet TV, and wireless video services. The leading technologies and the highly qualified personnel trained through this project will benefit the multimedia communication technology-based economy in Canada.