Digital Video Compression and coding
Ilios
Research and Development has extensive experience in digital video, both in
development of commercial products, and in leading-edge research in digital
video compression. We have worked closely with the MPEG steering and
technical committees who are responsible for state-of-the-art coding
standards including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.264
We
recently worked on a proprietary video compression scheme which promises
significant bit-rate reduction when applied in conjunction with MPEG-4 /
H.264. Previously we have worked to develop a world’s-best-practice
MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding service on a combined hardware/software
platform. We have also developed video surveillance products for utility
companies operating over their existing telemetry networks.
We
also continue to pursue research interests in fields such as automatic
image segmentation, stereo matching of image pairs, and video compression
techniques.
Blaze International
 
Ilios was recently contracted to work with Blaze
International on their PIXe video compression technology.
PIXe is a proprietary compression scheme which uses a grid-oscillation
technique to compress images, and promises significant bit-rate reduction
when applied in conjunction with MPEG-4 / H.264 compression to streaming
video. It is particularly suited to low bit-rate video streams such as used
in mobile phones and GPRS technologies.
Our involvement was to design a software implementation
for the PIXe encoder / decoder, with a mechanism for interworking with
existing MPEG-4 and H.264 codecs. This provided a platform for testing the
combined codec, and providing an objective analysis of the benefits of the
PIXe compression algorithm.
For
more information, visit the Blaze
International website or
PIXe website
Siemens ‘Eikona’ MPEG-1/2 Encoding System
 
Ilios were involved in a co-operative research project with
Siemens Australia and Monash University to design, develop and run a very
high quality MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video/audio encoding service, using a
combination hardware / software solution on a Sun workstation - this was at
a time when MPEG-1/2 were relatively new standards and coding platforms
were very expensive and typically could not offer high quality results. The
hardware development involved high-speed D1 format video capture and
playback, as well as a motion estimation accelerator. We were responsible
for the complete software development involving both MPEG-1 and MPEG-2
video, audio, and transport layer codecs, and drew on the video compression
expertise and research which had been conducted by the research team at
Monash. This team was a world leader in the field of video compression, and
included a number of academics and students who were actively involved in
the MPEG steering and technical committees.
Once
the “Eikona” system had been completed, it was offered as a
commercial service for encoding audio/video material to the highest
possible quality. We were involved in running this encoding service, and
also for conducting research to investigate and implement techniques for
improving picture quality. These techniques included :
·
·
Spatial
pre-filtering of input video prior to coding
·
·
Temporal filtering
of input video using motion-compensation
·
·
Scene change
detection; forcing I-frames to be located at scene changes
·
·
Identification of
regions of importance (such as faces) to be coded at higher quality (lower
Q factor) than other regions – initially these regions were
identified manually; methods were also investigated for identifying such
regions automatically
For more information, visit the following websites
Monash
University Centre for Telecommunications and Information Engineering (CTIE)
http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/research.htm
http://www.monash.edu.au/pubs/eureka/Eureka_95/video.html
RTUnet Video Surveillance System
 
Ilios
were contracted by RTUnet, creator of the ‘Kingfisher’ range of
telemetry equipment, to design and develop a video capture and storage unit
for security surveillance and monitoring applications over telemetry
networks. This involved hardware design of the capture and compression
unit; software design of a Windows application for interfacing with a
network of these units in a telemetry network; and design of a suitable
method for streaming this data across the network to a host computer
Two
products were designed: one with a dedicated Zoran JPEG-compression IC and
separate microprocessor for communications, for up to real-time, 25 frames
per second operation; and one with a general-purpose Analog Devices DSP,
for low-cost low-power operation at around one frame per second. We
designed and developed the code for both these units, including the DSP
code to perform motion-JPEG compression, mainly in C but with the
time-critical sections including the DCT transform in assembler.
This
involved hardware and software design for the video capture unit and
development of a windows-based program for communications with the devices,
uploading and storage and database management and archival of the images.
For
more information, visit the RTUnet
website.
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