PROGRESS REPORT ON ASSIGNMENT

ASSIGNMENT: Practical Development and

Implementation of a Simple (Two View) Wyner-
Ziv/Slepian-Wolf Codec)

Found two promising efforts to build on:

1. Discover Codec Project

2. MPEG-2 MATLAB Project

I actually found the second one first because it is a C/matlab codec

project. The other one is a mono-view Wyner-Ziv codec that I thought
should be easy to convert to a 2 view codec.

1. DISCOVER Codec Project

Authors:
Huisheng X. Artigas1, J. Ascenso2, M. Dalai3, S. Klomp4, D. Kubasov5, M. Ouaret6
1Technical University of Catalonia, 2Instituto Superior Técnico, 3University of Brescia,
4Leibniz Universität Hannover, 5INRIA Rennes, 6Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

The Project: Discover is acronym for: Distributed Coding for Video

Services a European project that ran for two years. The discover codec is
based on another codec, the H264 codec which is the reference codec
software held by the joint video team of MPEG and ITU-T. It is written in
Microsoft Visual basic.
The Technicalities:

 Distributed Video Coding is a new video coding paradigm based on

W-Z and S-W information theoretic results.
 The architecture is based on that proposed by Bernd Girod’s group
PRISM codec.
 It is a Mono-view W-Z codec, they claimed to have developed a multi-
view one but is not made publicly available.
 Simple encoding phase as seen from the architecture block diagram
below comprises blocks 1-3.
 The incoming sequences is split into two, 1st part known as key
frames is encoded by the conventional H264 encoder in intra mode.
 The remaining is encoded in distributed mode (W-Z) coding by
generating syndrome bits (which are coefficients of block based
transform) that are stored in a buffer. They are sent to the decoder
progressively when requested. A minimum number which is first
transmitted to decoder is calculated by encoder to avoid delay at
decoder and more bits are sent on request.
 The decoding is more complex due to the fact that temporal
correlation is exploited at the decoder by motion estimation. The key
frames are decoded by the H264 decoder which is used to construct
the so-called SI which is an estimate of the original W-Z frames got
by motion compensation between two sequential frames. The
difference between the W-Z and SI is considered to be correlation
noise (WZ-SI)
 The inverse transform of the block based transform is then used at
block 7 to get estimated coefficients taking into account the channel
noise. Block 8 does the W-Z decoding and iterates to ask for more
coefficients from the buffer until decoding is successful.
 The decoded sequence is obtained by conveniently multiplexing the
decoded key frames and W-Z frames.
Experiments and results reported by Discover:

 Experiments are performed using QCIF, YUV sequences. The

“foreman” and Hall &Monitor sequences results are published.
 Rate and distortion results refer to luminance.
 Result comparism is made with low complexity codecs such as
H263+ and H264 both in intra modes.
 Many papers and conferences presentations have been published
based on the discover codec.

My Results – What I have done so far

 Been able to acquire the foreman sequence and run the WZ discover
codec using this sequence in QCIF, YUV mode.

 I have tried other formats CIF, YUV mode that is also supported by
the Discover codec.

 I have tried to introduce my own video sequence which is the Dance

sequence view1 of the multi-view sequence that I have acquired and
converted to the QCIF, YUV format


Objective/Comments/Conclusion

 I need to get the codes to work with other sequences.

 I need to find a way to move on to multi-view (at first 2 views) and

exploit the correlation between views.

 Future further work is proposed to try out the MPEG-2 codec to see
how it compares with the WZ discover codec.

 A lot of groundwork on probably getting the raw Visual Basic codes

may be necessary to be able to adjust them.

 A matlab implementation of the codes should be tried, I realize that

most of the codes are been parsed through matlab to allow for plots
and comparism.