IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 9, NO.
1, FEBRUARY 2015
Global Motion Assisted Low Complexity Video
Encoding for UAV Applications
Malavika Bhaskaranand, Student Member, IEEE, and Jerry D. Gibson, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—We design a video encoding scheme that is suited for
applications such as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) video surveil-
lance where the encoder complexity needs to be low. Our low com-
plexity encoder predicts frames using the global motion informa-
tion available in UAVs and thus achieves lower complexity and
more than 40% BD-rate savings for fly-over videos compared to a
complexity-constrained H.264 encoder with motion estimation re-
stricted to 8 8 blocks and half pixel accuracy. We also incorporate
a spectral entropy based bit allocation scheme into this encoder to
achieve near constant quality within groups of pictures (GOPs) at
the cost of small increases in delay and complexity, and a small drop
in compression efficiency. Both these encoders with their corre-
sponding low complexity “matched” decoders provide significant
gains of more than 49% BD-rate savings over the Wyner-Ziv based
DISCOVER codec which has a low complexity encoder and a high
complexity decoder. Furthermore, for videos where the global mo-
tion is spatially consistent within 2 2 blocks, we show that the
computational complexity of these proposed encoders can be sig-
nificantly reduced with only about 1% BD-rate increase.
Index Terms—Complexity, global motion, low complexity video
encoding, spectral entropy based bit allocation.
I. INTRODUCTION
W ITH a growing interest in unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) for a wide range of applications, there is an
escalating need for incorporating video data compression units
into UAVs. In addition to being used in military applications,
UAVs are increasingly being used in commercial applica-
tions, particularly where the use of manned aircraft poses a
severe danger to the pilots [1], [2]. The increasing quantity
and quality of camera sensors pose challenges for the video
compression systems on board the UAVs. At the same time,
available transmission bandwidth has become more limited
due to the increase in the number of UAVs sharing the same
link [3]. These challenges are compounded by the stringent
space, weight, and power constraints and the desire for longer
endurance, greater functionality, and lower fuel consumption
in UAVs [4]. Furthermore, unlike typical video sequences that
have substantial local motion, the motion in the UAV fly-over
videos is primarily global and due to the movement of the
Manuscript received October 09, 2013; revised April 03, 2014; accepted July
18, 2014. Date of publication August 07, 2014; date of current version Jan-
uary 20, 2015. This research was supported in part by Raytheon Applied Signal
Technology, Inc. The guest editor coordinating the review of this manuscript
and approving it for publication was Dr. Vladan Velisavljevic.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engi-
neering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA (e-mail:
malavika@ece.ucsb.edu; gibson@ece.ucsb.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTSP.2014.2345563
1932-4553 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
139
UAV and camera mounts which is known. Therefore, there is
a need for low complexity video encoders that can efficiently
compress UAV fly-over videos with primarily global motion.
Traditional video compression standards such as H.264/AVC
and the recently finalized High Efficiency Video Coding
(HEVC) typically target applications such as entertainment
video broadcast, storage and playback, and video streaming,
where encoders can be complex but decoders need to be rel-
atively simple [5], [6]. The bulk of the complexity in such
encoders is due to the block motion estimation (ME) performed
to compensate for the local motion and predict frames from
previously encoded ones. Therefore, traditional compression
schemes are not designed to address the more stringent encoder
complexity constraints and the degrees of freedom present in
UAV video applications.
In this paper, we design novel low complexity encoders
suited for moderate to high frame-rate UAV video coding that
use global motion compensation for frame prediction. The
global motion information is assumed to be available from
other modules or easily derivable from the known movement
of the UAV and camera mounts, and is specified using the
homography transformation with eight parameters per frame
(unlike the six parameter affine transformation used in our
earlier papers [7], [8]). This global motion prediction approach
compensates the motion in the entire frame, unlike the block
motion based prediction used in mainstream video codecs
where the motion for each block can be specified separately
using a motion vector (MV).
Our encoders with global motion compensation achieve
lower complexity and more than 40% bitrate savings compared
to a complexity-constrained H.264/AVC encoder with block
ME restricted to 8 8 blocks and half pixel accuracy, since
our encoders replace the highly complex block ME engine of
the H.264 encoder with the relatively simpler global motion
compensation and do not need to transmit block MVs. We also
design a second set of encoders with global motion compen-
sation and a spectral entropy based bit allocation scheme that
achieve near constant quality across frames, but at the cost
of a small increase in delay, a slight increase in complexity,
and a modest loss in compression efficiency. We show that
these encoders with global motion in conjunction with their
corresponding low complexity “matched” decoders provide
substantial gains over the Wyner-Ziv DISCOVER codec [10]
which has a low complexity encoder and a high complexity
decoder. Additionally, we demonstrate that the complexities
of the proposed encoders can be significantly reduced without
significant compression performance losses, for videos with
global motion that is spatially consistent within 2 2 blocks
140 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 9, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2015
(not presented in our earlier work [7]–[9]). Furthermore, we
include complexity analysis and performance results for a
complexity-constrained H.264/AVC encoder in which motion
vectors are initialized using the global motion information
derived from the known movement of the UAV and camera
mounts, also not presented in our earlier papers [7]–[9]. Fur-
thermore, the analyses and discussions in this paper are more
detailed and comprehensive than in our earlier papers [7]–[9].
This paper is organized as follows. Section II presents a brief
overview of related research on low complexity video encoders
and the use of global motion models for motion estimation
and/or compensation in video codecs. Section III discusses the
architecture of the proposed encoders and the global motion
compensation and the spectral entropy based bit allocation
scheme used in our encoders. Section IV enumerates and
introduces the notation for all the different encoders analyzed
and compared in this paper. Section V presents a theoret-
ical analysis of the complexities of the proposed and other
hybrid encoders in terms of the number of computations,
number of memory accesses, and storage buffer sizes required.
Section VI evaluates and compares the rate-distortion perfor-
mances of our proposed encoders to that of the other H.264
based encoders and the Wyner-Ziv DISCOVER codec. Finally,
Section VII summarizes the paper and draws conclusions.
II. RELATED PRIOR RESEARCH
A. Low Complexity Encoders
Many researchers have worked on low complexity versions
of standard video encoders like H.264/AVC and MPEG-4. The
low complexity baseline profile of the H.264/AVC standard
discards complex coding toolsets such as B slices and CABAC
entropy coding [5] resulting in performance loss. Works such
as [11], [12] design encoders that can achieve multiple com-
plexity-rate-distortion points by choosing lower complexity
coding modes or by dynamically changing the block ME search
range. Fast mode decision algorithms [13], [14] have also been
proposed to reduce the complexity of H.264 encoders.
A complexity analysis [15] of the recently finalized HEVC
standard states that the “implementation cost of a HEVC de-
coder is not expected to be higher than that of an H.264/AVC
decoder”, but the encoder is “expected to be several times
more complex than an H.264/AVC encoder.” Therefore, one
can anticipate that low complexity HEVC encoders would be
developed in a manner similar to those of the low complexity
H.264/AVC encoders.
Outside the standards community, recent research on low
complexity video encoders has primarily been based on the
theory of Wyner-Ziv distributed source coding [16]. The first
Wyner-Ziv based video coding algorithms were developed
simultaneously by a group at Stanford University [17] and a
group at the University of California, Berkeley [18]. Although
it has been shown under i.i.d. and Gaussian assumptions
that such architectures achieve the same performance as
conventional motion compensated predictive video coding
systems [19], these results have not been achieved by practical
Wyner-Ziv based codecs. The DISCOVER codec, a Wyner-Ziv
codec based on the Stanford architecture has been shown
to outperform H.264/AVC intra and sometimes H.264/AVC
‘zero-motion’ standard coding [10].
One of the drawbacks in many implementations of the Stan-
ford architecture is their use of a feedback channel for encoder
rate control [20]. The feedback channel requires low delay de-
coding at the receiver because the Wyner-Ziv frame is decoded/
reconstructed several times in order to compute the total number
of bits required for successful reconstruction of that frame [20].
There have been modifications proposed to avoid the feedback
channel in [21]–[23]; however, these modifications increase the
complexity of the encoder and result in a loss of quality, es-
pecially for high bit-rates. Since in our target applications, im-
posing instantaneous decoding of the video stream at the re-
ceiver can be too restrictive, the DISCOVER codec based on
the Stanford architecture is not suitable.
B. Global Motion in Video Codecs
The MPEG4 Part 2 video coding standard supported global
motion using a single affine transformation to describe the mo-
tion of an entire frame with respect to its reference frame. How-
ever the global motion toolset was not widely adopted since the
large complexity cost of global motion estimation did not pro-
vide commensurate gains in rate-distortion performance [24].
Therefore, the H.264/AVC standard that succeeded MPEG4 Part
2 did not support global motion compensation. There have been
efforts [25], [26] to introduce additional global motion predic-
tion modes in H.264/AVC codecs that provide up to 27% bitrate
savings over the standard H.264/AVC codec.
Global motion has also been utilized within a temporal fil-
tering framework to improve the performance of H.264/AVC
codecs [27] and HEVC codecs [28]. Stojanovic and Ohm [29]
have used global motion compensation between temporally dis-
tant frames to improve the compression efficiency of HEVC,
particularly for video sequences with camera zoom. However,
all these techniques use global motion within a block ME frame-
work for standard video sequences and not for motion compen-
sating entire frames in video sequences with primarily global
motion.
Video codecs tailored for UAV applications have also been
proposed that use the available global motion information.
Gong et al. [30] use a homography model for the global motion,
merge the first intraframe and subsequent interframe residues
in a group of pictures (GOP) into a single “big image,” and
code this image using JPEG2000. However, the residue data
in the “big image” is not conducive to JPEG2000 compression
since JPEG2000 is primarily designed for natural images. The
work by Rodriguez et al. [31] uses the available global motion
information to initialize MVs and thus simplify the block
ME in a MPEG-4 encoder. Recently, Soares and Pinho [32]
and Angelino et al. [33] have presented modifications of the
H.264/AVC encoder to initialize MVs using the camera motion
information from UAV sensors. However these approaches still
perform block ME, albeit at a lower complexity, and transmit
the derived block MVs. Transmitting the global motion infor-
mation instead of the derived MVs is more rate efficient for
fly-over videos.
BHASKARANAND AND GIBSON: GLOBAL MOTION ASSISTED LOW COMPLEXITY VIDEO ENCODING FOR UAV APPLICATIONS
Fig. 1. Architecture of the proposed low complexity video encoders. The
blocks that are different from a standard H.264/AVC encoder are indicated by
shading.
III. PROPOSED ENCODER ARCHITECTURE
The block diagram of the proposed low complexity encoders
is shown in Fig. 1. The input video sequence of resolution
is divided into groups of pictures (GOPs). The first
frame in each GOP is intra coded and the remaining frames
in the GOP are inter-predicted from global motion compen-
sated reference frames. Unlike in conventional block ME, the
global motion parameters apply to the entire frame and not
for individual blocks. Then, the prediction residue is passed
through a spatial 2-D transform and the transform coefficients
are quantized and entropy coded. If the quantizer is to be
designed using the spectral entropy bit allocation scheme de-
veloped in [34], then the transform coefficients are buffered,
their variances are estimated, significant coefficients to be re-
tained are selected, bits are allocated, and scalar quantizers
that operate independently on the transform components are
designed.
Our new, low complexity video encoders use the 4 4 H.264
integer transform [35] and the H.264 quantization framework.
One of them uses the default H.264 quantization matrix (QM)
while the other uses QMs designed using spectral entropy based
bit allocation. The GOP size is set to 8 and interframes are pre-
dicted using 2 reference frames: the previous frame and the next
available intraframe.
A. Global Motion Compensation and Parameter Derivation
In our application, the observed scene can be approxi-
mated to be planar since the camera mounted on the UAV
is sufficiently far from the objects being observed. Therefore,
the motion across frames which is dominated by the camera
movement can be specified using the homography model [36]
which assumes the observed scene to be planar. This planar
assumption is violated only at the edges of high 3D objects
such as buildings and results in higher prediction error for a
very small fraction of pixels in the video sequences in our
dataset.
141
The eight parameter homography model [36] can handle
changes in view-point (perspective) in addition to rotation,
scaling, translation, and shear and is represented as
(1)
where are the pixel co-ordinates in the input image to
be homography transformed, are the co-ordinates after
the homography transformation, and is an auxiliary scaling
factor. Even though the homography matrix is a 3 3 ma-
trix, it has only 8 degrees of freedom due to the scaling
factor. Therefore, two matrices that differ only by scale are
equivalent.
UAVs have navigation systems that estimate the position and
attitude of the UAV typically using inertial navigation sensors
(INS) and/or global positioning sensors (GPS) [37]. The po-
sition and attitude obtained using these sensors could be used
to estimate the camera motion and hence the global motion in
the video sequence as follows. The homography matrix that
transforms the image captured at time instant to the co-ordi-
nates of the image captured at time instant can be derived as
(2)
where is the camera calibration matrix, is the camera ro-
tation matrix, is the distance of the camera from the imaging
plane (height of the UAV from the ground), is the camera
translation vector, and is a unit normal on the imaging plane
with respect to the camera axes at [31]. The camera calibra-
tion matrix has the form
(3)
where and are the physical width and height of a pixel on
the camera's sensor and and are the horizontal and vertical
offsets of the camera's center of projection in the image plane.
However, the motion estimates from the INS could be inac-
curate due to accumulated errors especially in low-cost UAVs
and data from the GPS system could be unavailable due to the
inaccessibility of external satellite signals [37]. To overcome
these limitations, vision-based methods [37]–[40] have been de-
veloped that use the camera-captured video data to either im-
prove the accuracy of the position and attitude estimated using
INS/GPS or compute the position and attitude without relying
on the INS/GPS data. Therefore, the homography transforma-
tion used for global motion compensation in our proposed en-
coders could be derived from the position and attitude estimated
using such vision-based methods. Furthermore, when the posi-
tion and attitude are estimated using vision-based methods such
as [37], [38] that compute the homography transformation be-
tween video frames, the already computed homography param-
eters can be used for global motion compensation in our pro-
posed encoders.
Given the homography matrix that describes the motion of
the current frame with respect to the reference frame, the motion
142 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 9, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2015

across them is compensated by computing for each full- are ordered based on their energies i.e., .
pixel position in the current frame using (1) and reading Let there be sampling functions (blocks/frames) each with
the data at location in the reference frame, approximated such components. Out of the total coefficients, let
to the nearest half-pixel position with the pixel data being gen- coefficients be coded. Then the spectral entropy-based coeffi-
erated using the H.264/AVC interpolation filter. Moreover, in cient selection [42], [45] dictates that the number of coefficients
the cases when some portions of the observed scene towards coded in each component should be proportional to the vari-
the edges of the current frame are not present in the reference ance of that component i.e., , where
frame, the pixels in those regions of the current frame are pre- and .
dicted from the border pixels of the reference frame extrapo- If is the average number of bits spent to code a coef-
lated using the nearest-neighbor algorithm. However, since our ficient of component , the total number of bits spent is
encoders use bidirectional prediction, these “new” regions in the where is the number
current frame are present in either of the past or future reference of bits required to code the binary significance map that indi-
frame and hence do not greatly affect the encoder rate-distortion cates the significant coefficients. The coding distortion is gen-
performance for the video sequences studied here. erated by two sources: quantization and discarding coefficients.
The homography matrix can be viewed as a concise descrip- Hence the expected value of the distortion of the th component
tion of the translation of each pixel at location in the can be written as
current frame to the pixel at location in the reference
frame. Therefore, if the global motion is spatially consistent
within a small spatial neighborhood, we can approximate that
all the pixels in the spatial neighborhood defined by
in the current frame get
translated by the same amount to match the spatial neighbor- (5)
hood in the reference frame. Such an ap-
In this equation, the quantization error is computed assuming
proximation further reduces the computational complexity of
that the overload distortion is negligible and the high-resolution
the homography transformation since (1) needs to be evaluated
approximation holds and is a constant determined by the dis-
only once for each spatial neighborhood. Later in Sections V and
tribution of the normalized random variable [46].
VI, we demonstrate that this approximation of the homography
transformation for 2 2 blocks (i.e., and ) sig- Hence, the problem of bit allocation is to find for
nificantly reduces the motion compensation complexity with a so as to minimize subject to
very small loss in compression performance. the bit budget constraint that .
Using Lagrangian optimization methods, the number of bits
B. Spectral Entropy Bit Allocation allocated to each of the coded coefficients of component can
In this section, we present a bit allocation scheme based on be shown to be
the principles of spectral entropy developed by Campbell [41]
and Yang et al. [42] as a basis for efficiently sampling frequency
coefficients. Yang et al. [42] have shown that the Campbell
(6)
bandwidth is the minimum average bandwidth for encoding the
This is similar to the result of classical bit allocation [46] except
process across all possible distortion levels. In addition, Jung
and Gibson [43] have obtained an expression for coefficient rate that the geometric mean of 's has been replaced
using the logarithm of the ratio of rate-distortion function slopes by and the geometric mean of 's has
for the given source and a uniform source, where the logarithm been replaced by . The corresponding total distor-
is averaged over large distortions. These results indicate a rela- tion is
tionship between coefficient rate and the rate-distortion function
of a source. Therefore, we have developed a spectral entropy
based bit allocation scheme [34], [44] starting with the spectral
entropy based coefficient selection method developed by Yang (7)
et al. [42]. Here we include a brief derivation and discussion of The proposed bit allocation method examines the input trans-
our bit allocation scheme for completeness. form coefficients and chooses to code only those that are signif-
Consider a zero-mean, stationary, continuous-time random icant for retaining signal fidelity. Therefore, this method adapts
process . Using the K-L expansion in the time interval to the actual coefficient values that need to be coded. In con-
, the process can be decomposed as trast, the classical bit allocation method relies entirely on the
energies of the transform components and hence is designed for
a class of inputs, all having the same component energies but
(4)
different coefficient values. Ortega and Ramchandran [47] have
noted that “input-by-input” approaches that adapt to the source
where 's are normalized eigenfunctions and 's are un- data being compressed are likely to be superior to “one size fits
correlated random variables with and . all” approaches that are designed to perform well on average for
Without loss of generality, we can assume that the components a class of inputs.
BHASKARANAND AND GIBSON: GLOBAL MOTION ASSISTED LOW COMPLEXITY VIDEO ENCODING FOR UAV APPLICATIONS
For the case when all the components have the same nor-
malized distribution, , (6) can be rewritten
as
(8)
where is the spectral entropy ex-
pressed in bits and is the coefficient rate. In (8),
the first term is an average bitrate, the second term depends
on the source, and the last term depends on the current com-
ponent being coded.
The corresponding classical bit allocation equation can be ex-
pressed as
(9)
❷
❸ in the GMh_1 1 and GMs_1 1 encoders to compute the
where in is replaced by in ❷ and the arithmetic mean
of 's in is replaced by the geometric mean
in ❸.
In a two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (DCT) based
coding scheme, Mester and Franke [48] used the spectral
entropy (corresponding to ) and the energy (corresponding
to ) of the transform coefficients to classify data blocks and
adopted different coding strategies for the different classes.
They used these two measures to estimate the amount of tol-
erable errors and sensitivity to quantization and/or truncation
and thus develop an adaptation scheme for a threshold coding
system. The spectral entropy and energy were treated as or-
thogonal entities in their work, where as (8) provides a way
to combine the average bitrate (first term), spectral entropy
(second term ), and energy (third term ) for bit allocation.
IV. ENCODERS EVALUATED AND NOMENCLATURE
In this paper, we compare the complexity and compression
performance of eight different encoders: two versions of the
proposed encoder with global motion compensation and de-
fault H.264 QM; two versions of the proposed encoder with
global motion compensation and spectral entropy QMs; two
H.264 based encoders with block ME; one zero motion en-
coder without any motion estimation or compensation; and one
Wyner-Ziv based DISCOVER encoder (used with a high com-
plexity decoder). This section introduces each of these encoders
and the notation used to refer to them in the rest of this paper.
The proposed encoder with global motion compensation and
default H.264 QM is termed the GMh_1 1 encoder where
‘GM’ stands for global motion and ‘h’ for default H.264 QM,
and ‘1 1’ indicates that the homography transformation in (1)
143
TABLE I
NOMENCLATURE OF THE HYBRID ENCODERS EVALUATED.
is applied to each pixel or 1 1 block. Similarly, the proposed
encoder with global motion compensation and QMs designed
using the spectral entropy based bit allocation is referred to
as the GMs_1 1 encoder where ‘s’ stands for spectral en-
tropy QM. We also modify the global motion compensation
homography transformation for 2 2 blocks (as discussed
in Section III-A) instead of for each pixel and denote these
encoders as GMh_2 2 and GMs_2 2. In Section V, we show
that these GMh_2 2 and GMs_2 2 encoders have much
lower complexity than the GMh_1 1 and GMs_1 1 encoders.
We compare our proposed encoders to a complexity-con-
strained H.264 encoder with block ME restricted to 8 8 blocks,
half pixel MV accuracy, and no deblocking filter. This encoder
is termed the BMh_8 8 encoder where ‘BM’ denotes block
motion. We have found that for the test sequences presented
in this paper, a ME search area of 32 32 in the BMh_8 8
encoder gives good results at reasonable complexity. We also
include in our comparison, a global motion assisted H.264
encoder that we denote as BGMh_8 8 where ‘BGM’ stands
for global motion initialized block ME. The BGMh_8 8
encoder is the BMh_8 8 encoder with its MVs initialized (be-
fore block ME) using the available global motion parameters
and is similar to the encoders proposed for UAV applications
in [31]–[33]. Since the MVs in this encoder are initialized
using global motion, the search range for block ME in the
BGMh_8 8 encoder can be reduced to 16 16 to achieve
compression performance similar to that of the BMh_8 8
encoder. As a baseline reference for the performances of the
above encoders, we include a H.264 encoder with zero motion
where all the MVs are set to zero and hence no bits are spent on
transmitting MVs. We denote this encoder as ZMh_8 8 where
‘ZM’ represents zero motion and 8 8 represents the block
sizes for which the decision of uni-directional or bi-directional
prediction is made. Interframe prediction in all these encoders
(GMh_1 1, GMh_2 2, GMs_1 1, GMs_2 2, BMh_8 8,
BGMh_8 8, and ZMh_8 8) is performed using 2 reference
frames. The nomenclature of these encoders is summarized in
Table I.
144 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 9, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2015
We do not include analysis and results for the BMh_4 4
encoder with ME blocks allowed to be of size 4 4 or 8 8. The
BMh_4 4 encoder has poorer compression performance than
the BMh_8 8 encoder because no rate-distortion optimized
mode decision is used in either encoder due to its complexity.
Further, the drop in performance with the use of ME on 4 4
blocks is because the bitrate increase due to the greater number
of MVs in BMh_4 4 compared to BMh_8 8 does not offset
the quality gains obtained due to better motion prediction. In
addition, the number of memory accesses required for ME on
4 4 blocks is about twice that required for ME on 8 8 blocks
and this is one of the main reasons why 4 4 blocks sizes are
not allowed for inter-prediction in HEVC [6].
All the encoders discussed so far in this section utilize some
form of inter-frame prediction around a 2D spatial transform
and hence are termed hybrid encoders. In this paper, we com-
pare the performances of these hybrid encoders with the DIS-
COVER codec [10] that uses a low-density parity-check accu-
mulate (LDPCA) code based channel encoder and a high com-
plexity decoder with motion interpolation.
V. COMPLEXITY ANALYSIS
The electronic components of UAV payloads are resource
constrained largely due to power limitations. The dynamic
power consumed in a circuit is proportional to its clock fre-
quency. Reducing the number of computations per unit time
would enable running the circuit at a lower clock frequency,
thus resulting in lower power consumption [49]. Therefore, the
number of computations is an important factor contributing to
the complexity of a video codec system.
Another important factor contributing to the video encoder's
power consumption is the number of external SDRAM memory
accesses. For encoding 720p video, the SDRAM memory ac-
cesses will have a significant power consumption of about 40 –
120 mW with 1 reference frame and higher with more reference
frames [49]. An additional parameter frequently used to charac-
terize the complexity of a video codec system is the size of the
memory/storage required.
In addition to the number of computations, the number of
memory accesses, and the memory (storage) requirements, the
complexity of real-world systems depends on a number of other
factors such as the availability of hardware accelerators, that
are highly dependent on the particular implementation of the
system. However, the number of computations, the number of
memory accesses, and the memory requirements are common
and significant factors contributing to the complexity of real-
world systems. Therefore in this section, we present a theoret-
ical analysis of the complexity in terms of the number of com-
putations, the number of memory accesses (reads and writes),
and the memory requirements as a necessary first step towards
comparing the complexities of the various encoders presented in
this paper. Complexity analyses of the implementations of these
encoders in real-world systems are consigned to future work.
A. Complexity of Encoders
In this subsection, we evaluate the complexities of all the hy-
brid encoders listed in Table I in terms of the average number of
computations required for processing one macroblock of data,
the average number of memory reads and writes required per
macroblock processed, and the memory (storage) requirements.
TABLE II
SUMMARY OF COMPLEXITY ANALYSIS OF THE HYBRID ENCODERS IN
TABLE I FOR 640 480 SEQUENCE AND 2 REFERENCE FRAMES.
Here the term macroblock (MB) is used to refer to an image area
of 16 16 pixels. The memory accesses and computations are
evaluated only for the processing blocks that differ across the
encoders viz. block motion estimation, global motion compen-
sation, and spectral entropy-based QM design. The complexity
analysis is summarized in Table II with details provided in the
respective subsections that follow.
The BGMh_8 8 encoder requires fewer computations and
memory accesses than the BMh_8 8 encoder because the use
of global motion to initialize MVs allows reduced ME search
area size and average number of block candidate searches.
The GMh_1 1 encoder also requires fewer computations and
memory accesses than the BMh_8 8 encoder since it replaces
block ME with the simpler global motion compensation. The
number of computations for global motion compensation can
be reduced to a fourth by computing the homography once
for each 2 2 block in the GMh_2 2 encoder instead of for
every pixel in the GMh_1 1 encoder. The use of spectral en-
tropy based QM design increases the number of computations,
memory accesses, and storage requirements for the GMs_1 1
and GMs_2 2 encoders, but these encoders still require fewer
memory accesses than the BMh_8 8 encoder. The ZMh_8 8
encoder is the least complex since it does not perform block
ME or global motion compensation. All these hybrid encoders
have similar storage requirements except the GMs_1 1 and
GMs_2 2 encoders which require about 300 kB additional
memory for buffering transform coefficients.
The Wyner-Ziv DISCOVER codec encoding time has been
shown to be less than 1/6-th the encoding time of the zero mo-
tion H.264 encoder [50]. Therefore, we conjecture that the DIS-
COVER encoder has lower complexity than the hybrid encoders
discussed above.
1) Computations: From (1), the global motion compensation
using homography seems to require 6 multiplications and 6 ad-
ditions per pixel. This translates to multiplications
and additions per MB where is the size of the
MB, is the block size for which the homography transfor-
mation is applied ( for the GMh_1 1 and GMs_1 1
encoders and for the GMh_2 2 and GMs_2 2 en-
coders), and is the number of reference frames used. How-
ever on closer examination, we observe that for a video frame
of width pixels and height pixels, the pixel co-ordinates
and take only a finite set of
values. Hence we can pre-compute the quantities and
for , store them, and reuse them to reduce
the computational complexity of global motion compensation.
BHASKARANAND AND GIBSON: GLOBAL MOTION ASSISTED LOW COMPLEXITY VIDEO ENCODING FOR UAV APPLICATIONS
TABLE III
COMPUTATIONS PER MACROBLOCK FOR GMH_
AND GMS_ ENCODERS.
Therefore, the number of additions required per MB for global
motion compensation using homography transformation is
(10)
and the number of multiplications required per MB is
(11)
The spectral entropy based QM design in the
encoder involves computing the energy of the coefficients
which requires additions and multiplications per MB. The
number of computations per MB for the and
encoders are listed in Table III for
and 2, and . frame but large enough to store the block ME search area used
On the other hand, the complexity of evaluating a single can-
didate block during block ME is equal to the complexity of
the sum of absolute differences (SAD) computation i.e.,
additions. For video sequences typical of UAV surveillance
and with half-pixel MV accuracy and block ME search range
of 32 32, the EPZS algorithm [51] requires about 11 candi-
date searches per block on an average with 2 reference frames.
Therefore, the BMh_8 8 encoder requires about 5632 additions
per MB.
The BGMh_8 8 encoder uses a reduced ME search area
of 16 16 (compared to the 32 32 ME search area of the
BMh_8 8 encoder) and hence requires only about 5 candidate
searches per block on an average with 2 reference frames
(compared to the 11 candidate searches required on average
per block for the BMh_8 8 encoder). The ME engine in the
BGMh_8 8 encoder also includes the computation of global
motion for 8 8 blocks that involves about 24 additions and 16
multiplications per MB.
Since the proposed GMh_1 1, GMh_2 2, GMs_1 1, and
GMh_2 2 encoders with global motion compensation and the
BMh_8 8, and BGMh_8 8 encoders all use half-pixel accu-
rate motion compensation with the same H.264/AVC interpola-
tion filter, the computational complexity of pixel interpolation
in all these encoders is assumed to be the same and hence is ex-
cluded from the analysis here.
In order to compare the computational complexities of these
various encoders that require different number of additions and
multiplications, it is beneficial to approximate each multiplica-
tion operation by an equivalent number of addition operations
that consume the same power. The ratio of the power consumed
by the 16-bit multipliers proposed in [52] and the 16-bit adders
considered in [53] is between 2 and 4 using the same
silicon technology. Therefore by approximating a multiplication
145
TABLE IV
MEMORY ACCESSES PER MACROBLOCK FOR GMH_
AND GMS_ ENCODERS.
to be power-equivalent to 3 additions, the number of equiva-
lent additions required per MB is for the GMh_1 1
encoder, for the GMh_2 2 encoder, for the
GMs_1 1 encoder, for the GMs_2 2 encoder, and
for the BGMh_8 8 encoder. Hence, the GMh_1 1,
GMh_2 2, and GMs_2 2 encoders require fewer computa-
tions than the BMh_8 8 encoder while the GMs_1 1 encoder
requires similar number of computations as the BMh_8 8 en-
coder. The BGMh_8 8 encoder requires fewer computations
than the GMh_1 1 and GMs_1 1 encoders, but more than the
GMh_2 2 and GMs_2 2 encoders.
For the ZMh_8 8 encoder, no computations are necessary
for motion estimation or compensation, since all MVs are set to
zero. Therefore, it is the least computationally intensive encoder
among all the hybrid encoders.
2) Memory Accesses: In this subsection, we compute the
number of external memory accesses assuming cache sizes to
be smaller than the memory required to store pixels of one video
by the BMh_8 8 and the BGMh_8 8 encoders.
The global motion compensation operation requires
memory reads (each accessing 8 bits) per MB corresponding to
the access of data from the reference frames. It does not de-
pend on , the size of the block for which the homography
transformation is applied. Since the spectral entropy based QM
design requires the energy of the coefficients to be computed
before the QM is designed, it involves additional memory reads
and writes of transform coefficient data which typically have
higher 14-bit precision compared to 8-bit pixel data. Therefore,
treating one 14-bit memory access as equivalent to two 8-bit
memory accesses, the spectral entropy based QM design neces-
sitates an additional -bit memory writes per MB to store
the coefficients and -bit memory reads per MB to access
the coefficients for quantization after the QM is designed. The
8-bit memory accesses for the proposed encoders are tabulated
in Table IV with and . In terms of power con-
sumed, memory writes are considered equivalent to memory
reads since the two memory access operations consume similar
amounts of power for a given memory bandwidth [54].
For computing the number of 8-bit memory accesses in the
ME engine of the BMh_8 8 encoder, we assume ME blocks of
size and a search area size of centered about
the same location as the current block. If the overlapping regions
of search areas within the same reference frame are reused for
adjacent blocks (level C memory reuse as described in [55]), the
number of 8-bit memory accesses per block is given by
(12)
The assumption that the search area is centered about the
same location as the current block is very restrictive and
146 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 9, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2015

TABLE V encoders evaluated here (BMh_8 8, BGMh_8 8, ZMh_8 8,

MEMORY REQUIREMENTS FOR GMH_ GMh_1 1, GMh_2 2) have similar storage requirements
AND GMS_ ENCODERS. except the GMs_1 1 and GMs_2 2 encoders which require
about 300 kB of extra storage.

B. Complexity of Global Motion Parameter Derivation

can result in reduced coding efficiency for fast motion video
sequences since motion vectors (MVs) can exceed the given
search range [56]. Hence in most cases, the search area is cen-
tered about the MV predictor and a more sophisticated search
area reuse algorithm such as [56] needs to be used. Since the
memory reuse is much less when the search area is centered
about the MV predictor than when it is centered about the same
location as the current block, the average number of memory
accesses is larger.
Considering the best scenario in which the search area is cen-
tered about the same location as the current block, the number
of memory accesses per MB for ME is
in the BMh_8 8 encoder with search area 32 32 and
in the BGMh_8 8 encoder with search area
16 16. The corresponding number for the
encoder is 512 and that for the encoder
is 1536. Consequently, the number of memory accesses re-
quired by the encoder is less than that
required by both the BMh_8 8 and BGMh_8 8 encoders. The
encoder requires fewer memory accesses
than the BMh_8 8 encoder, but more than that required by the
BGMh_8 8 encoder.
The ZMh_8 8 encoder only requires the co-located blocks
from the reference frame for motion compensation, and hence
needs memory reads per MB. Therefore, it requires as many
memory accesses as the encoder, but fewer
memory accesses than the encoder.
3) Memory Requirements: The external memory require-
ments of the encoders include bytes
for the reference frame buffers, bytes for the current frame
buffer, bytes to store the pre-computed quan-
tities for global motion compensation, and bytes for storing
constants where is the size of the 2-D spatial transform
used. In addition to the buffers used by the
encoders, the encoders require additional
storage for the transform coefficient buffer and the spectral en-
tropy QM look-up table. The buffer for storing the transform co-
efficients with 14-bit precision has to be bytes large. How-
ever, if the bottom half of this buffer is used to store the current
frame (with 8-bit pixel data), the additional memory required for
the transform coefficient buffer is only bytes. The spectral
entropy QM look-up table requires bytes. These memory
requirements are presented in Table V for , , and
. compensated interpolation using 2 nearest reconstructed frames.
The BMh_8 8, BGMh_8 8, and ZMh_8 8 encoders
require bytes for the current and reference
frame buffers and bytes for constants. In addition, the
BGMh_8 8 encoder requires bytes for global
motion compensation with . Therefore, all the hybrid
The homography model parameters of a video sequence can
be derived as in (2) from the UAV position and attitude informa-
tion that is available from the INS/GPS systems or vision-based
estimation methods [37]–[40]. The vision-based position and
attitude estimation methods when employed are considered as
part of the navigation system and hence their complexities are
not included in the complexity analysis of our proposed en-
coders. In (2), the matrices , , and are of size 3 3 and
the vectors and are of size 3 1. Since the camera calibra-
tion matrix is independent of the movement of the UAV and
camera mount, and can be pre-computed. Hence the ho-
mography matrix derivation requires 21 additions and 36 mul-
tiplications that are power-equivalent to 129 additions. These
129 additions per frame for a 640 480 sequence correspond
to about 0.1 additions per 16 16 MB. Assuming all the ma-
trices and vectors in (2) are stored with 32-bit precision, 132
memory reads and 132 bytes of storage are required to compute
the global motion parameters of each frame which corresponds
to 0.03 memory accesses per MB. Therefore, the derivation of
the global motion parameters from the camera motion informa-
tion is a very low complexity operation.
VI. COMPRESSION PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
In this section, we present results for the compression perfor-
mance of the proposed encoders with global motion compen-
sation used in conjunction with their corresponding low com-
plexity “matched” decoders. We compare their performances
with those of a complexity-constrained H.264 (BMh_8 8) en-
coder, a global motion assisted H.264 (BGMh_8 8) encoder,
and a zero-motion H.264 (ZMh_8 8) encoder, also with their
corresponding “matched” decoders. The different bitrate points
for all these hybrid encoders are obtained at fixed H.264 quan-
tization parameters (QPs) in the range 16 – 40. For all these
encoders, the GOP size is set to 8 and the I frames are encoded
using the same H.264 intraframe encoder. Implementations of
all these encoders are in MATLAB r2011b.
We also include results for the Wyner-Ziv based DISCOVER
codec [10], [57] which has a low complexity encoder and a high
complexity decoder. We use a 2007 implementation of the DIS-
COVER codec provided on the project website [57]. Recent im-
provements to the DISCOVER codec such as those proposed
in [58], [59] have not been included since their implementa-
tions were not available. However, even with these improve-
ments, the performance of the DISCOVER codec is very sim-
ilar to or slightly better than that of H.264/AVC codec with zero
motion. For the Wyner-Ziv DISCOVER codec, the different bi-
trate points are achieved by varying the quantization index from
1– 8. The side information at the decoder is derived via motion
The GOP size is set to 8 and I frames (also called key frames
in Wyner-Ziv video coding literature) are coded using a H.264
intraframe encoder.
The video sequences used to evaluate the encoders range
in resolution from 176 144 (QCIF) to 640 480 (VGA) with
BHASKARANAND AND GIBSON: GLOBAL MOTION ASSISTED LOW COMPLEXITY VIDEO ENCODING FOR UAV APPLICATIONS 147

Fig. 2. Rate-distortion performance for 176 144 “aerial_beach1_crop” sequence. The encoder nomenclature remains the same as described in Table I. (a) Average
PSNR vs. bitrate. (b) Average SSIM vs. bitrate.

Fig. 3. Quality variation across GOPs for 176 144 “aerial_beach1_crop” sequence. The encoder nomenclature remains the same as described in Table I.
(a) Standard deviation of PSNR vs. average PSNR. (b) Standard deviation of SSIM vs. average SSIM.

frames captured at the rate of 24 to 30 frames per second. Al-
though the global motion parameters for the
and encoders can be derived from the position
and attitude of the UAV, we have found it difficult to obtain un-
compressed video sequences with this metadata. Data obtained
from the sensor data management system of the Air Force Re-
search Laboratory [60] was found to contain incorrect camera
information. Therefore, for the results presented in this section,
we estimate the homography global motion parameters from
the video sequence using the Scale Invariant Feature Transform
(SIFT) [61] to find point correspondences between two video
frames and the RANdom Sample And Consensus (RANSAC)
algorithm [62] to determine the homography transformation that
best describes the global motion between those two frames.
We evaluate the average rate-distortion performances of the
encoders by plotting the average frame quality against the av-
erage bitrate. We also quantify the consistency of frame quality
by computing the standard deviation of the frame quality within
each GOP and plot it against the average frame quality. The
frame quality is measured using PSNR and SSIM [63] and
encoder performances are compared using the BD-rate and
BD-PSNR [64] measures.
In Figs. 2 and 3 we compare the performance of the var-
ious hybrid encoders listed in Table I with their respective
“matched” decoders for 89 frames of the 176 144 (QCIF)
“aerial_beach1_crop” sequence. We also include results for
the Wyner-Ziv based DISCOVER codec [10]. Fig. 2 plots the
average PSNR and SSIM against the average bit-rate while
Fig. 3 plots the standard deviation of PSNR and SSIM within
GOPs against the average PSNR and SSIM.
From Fig. 2, we see that the BGMh_8 8 encoder performs as
well as the BMh_8 8 encoder, but at lower complexity. This is
because the BGMh_8 8 encoder uses smaller ME search areas
centered around the MVs initialized using global motion param-
eters, but still transmits MVs.
Comparing the curves for the BMh_8 8 and the GMh_1 1
encoders, we note that the use of the known global motion
instead of block motion gives a significant BD-rate saving of
40% or equivalently a BD-PSNR improvement of 2.5 dB. This
performance improvement is largely because the GMh_1 1
encoder does not need to transmit motion information since it
utilizes the global motion parameters derivable at both the en-
coder and decoder. In contrast, the BMh_8 8 encoder spends
a significant fraction of its bitrate on coding MVs, ranging
from 10% at higher bitrates to 80% at very low bitrates. The
GMh_2 2 encoder provides compression performance similar
(1% BD-rate increase) to that of the GMh_1 1 encoder, despite
its much lower computational complexity. This is because for
148 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 9, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2015
TABLE VI
PERFORMANCE GAINS OF PROPOSED GMH_1 1 AND GMS_1 1 ENCODERS
OVER THE BMH_8 8 ENCODER.
the “aerial_beach1_crop” sequence, the motion is spatially
consistent within 2 2 blocks i.e., the motion of all the 4 pixels
in each 2 2 block are very similar.
The use of spectral entropy based bit allocation in the
GMs_1 1 encoder makes the quality across frames more
constant as seen in Fig. 3 but slightly degrades the average
rate-distortion performance (BD-rate loss of 16% compared
to GMh_1 1 encoder). However, the GMs_1 1 encoder
still outperforms the BMh_8 8 encoder particularly at lower
bitrates. The improvement in performance of the GMs_1 1
encoder with respect to that of the BMh_8 8 encoder is 30%
in terms of BD-rate savings and 1.6 dB in terms of BD-PSNR
increase. The compression performances of the GMs_1 1 and
GMs_2 2 encoders are similar, once again because of the
spatial consistency of the motion within 2 2 blocks.
The GMh_1 1 and GMs_1 1 encoders with corresponding
low complexity “matched” decoders achieve BD-rate savings of
56% and 49% respectively over the DISCOVER codec which
has a low complexity encoder and a high complexity decoder. In
addition for the DISCOVER codec, the PSNR of frames within
a GOP fluctuates considerably as demonstrated in Fig. 3. This
is because the quality of the side information derived at the
decoder depends on the distance of the frame from the intra
frames and this affects the reconstructed frame quality. Unlike
the DISCOVER codec, our proposed encoders do not require
feedback channels and provide better compression efficiency
than the BMh_8 8 encoder. The zero motion H.264 encoder
(ZMh_8 8) has the poorest rate-distortion performance of all
the encoders compared here and is included only for reference.
Similar results have been obtained for other test sequences
with primarily global motion and are summarized in Table VI in
terms of the BD-rate savings and BD-PSNR improvements
of the GMh_1 1 and GMs_1 1 encoders with respect to the
BMh_8 8 encoder. Since the performances of the BMh_8 8
and BGMh_8 8 encoders are similar, we choose to present
the performance gains with respect to only the BMh_8 8
encoder. Along the same lines, we present results only for the
GMh_1 1 and GMs_1 1 encoders whose compression per-
formances are similar to those of the GMh_2 2 and GMs_2 2
encoders respectively. In all cases, the proposed GMh_1 1
and GMs_1 1 encoders achieve significant compression per-
formance improvement over the BMh_8 8 encoder.
In certain application scenarios, all the information about the
UAV and camera motion required to derive the global motion
parameters might not be available at the decoder or the global
motion parameters are derived from the video data. In such
cases, the global motion parameters used in the video encoder
need to be embedded in the video bitstream and transmitted.
The transmission of an eight parameter homography matrix with
single-precision requires . If two homography
matrices are transmitted for every frame, this would translate
to an additional 15 kbps for a video sequence at 30 frames per
second.
For the “aerial_beach1_crop” sequence for which results
were presented in Figs. 2 and 3, the GMh_1 1 and GMs_1 1
encoders still achieve BD-rate savings of 34% and 24% respec-
tively compared to the BMh_8 8 encoder, instead of 40% and
30% BD-rate savings without transmitting the homography
parameters. Similar small drops in the performance gains of
the GMh_1 1 and GMs_1 1 encoders over the BMh_8 8
encoder have been observed for the other test sequences when
the homography parameters are transmitted.
Therefore, the additional bitrate required to transmit the
global motion parameters to the decoder does not greatly affect
the performance improvements achieved by the GMh_1 1 and
GMs_1 1 encoders over the BMh_8 8 encoder. This addi-
tional bitrate can be reduced by predicting the global motion
parameters for the current frame from the parameters of the
previous frame using a method like that given in [65].
VII. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Motivated by UAV video applications, we have proposed low
complexity (GMh_1 1) encoders that utilize the known global
motion and are superior to the complexity-constrained H.264
(BMh_8 8) encoder with 8 8 block ME for fly-over videos
mainly due to two reasons: (a) they replace the highly com-
plex block motion estimation engine with the relatively sim-
pler global motion compensation and hence reduce the encoder
complexity and (b) they do not need to transmit MVs which
if transmitted can constitute a significant fraction of the bit-
stream. Our new (GMh_1 1) encoders achieve more than 40%
BD-rate savings or equivalently more than 1.7 dB BD-PSNR
improvement at lower complexity compared to the complexity-
constrained H.264 (BMh_8 8) encoder. We have demonstrated
that for videos with global motion that is spatially consistent
within 2 2 blocks, the computational complexity of this en-
coder can be reduced by 75% to obtain the GMh_2 2 encoder
without considerably affecting the compression performance.
We have also incorporated into these encoders, a spectral
entropy based QM design scheme that provides near constant
quality within GOPs at the cost of small increases in delay
and complexity, and a small drop in compression efficiency.
Compared to the complexity-constrained H.264 encoder
(BMh_8 8), these (GMs_1 1 and GMs_2 2) encoders with
spectral entropy QM design still provide more than 28%
BD-rate savings.
All our proposed encoders (GMh_1 1, GMh_2 2,
GMs_1 1, GMs_2 2) provide significant compression gains
of more than 49% BD-rate savings over the Wyner-Ziv DIS-
COVER codec. Furthermore, we have considered the case
when the global motion parameters cannot be derived at the
decoder and have shown that embedding the global motion
parameters in the video bitstream only requires an additional
15 kbps and hence does not greatly reduce the compression
performance gains of the proposed encoders.
BHASKARANAND AND GIBSON: GLOBAL MOTION ASSISTED LOW COMPLEXITY VIDEO ENCODING FOR UAV APPLICATIONS
In our complexity analysis, we evaluate the encoders in
terms of the following factors that most significantly contribute
to their complexity and power consumption in real-world sys-
tems: number of computations, memory accesses, and memory
storage. The fewer computations and memory accesses re-
quired by our GMh_1 1, GMh_2 2, and GMs_2 2 encoders
compared to the BMh_8 8 encoder can translate to lower
power consumed for video encoding in UAVs. Moreover, the
bitrate savings achieved at fixed video quality by our encoders
can help reduce power required to transmit the compressed
video bitstream in UAVs, because a reduced bitrate directly
translates into lower transmitted power.
The strength of our encoders is that they utilize the global
motion information available in many UAV applications. In
cases when the global motion parameters are not readily avail-
able or cannot be estimated accurately from UAV sensor data,
they could be computed using fast image registration techniques
that could possibly employ fast point-feature descriptors such
as FAST-ER [66] and real-time RANSAC variations such as
ARRSAC [67] or be refined using algorithms such as those in
[68] from initial estimates derived from UAV sensor data. These
estimated global motion parameters can be used to achieve the
compression performance of any of our proposed encoders,
albeit at a higher complexity due to the global motion parameter
estimation or refinement. However, if the additional complexity
of global motion parameter estimation or refinement is not
acceptable, a H.264/AVC encoder like the BMh_8 8 encoder
could be used at the cost of lower compression efficiency.
Therefore, one needs to chose the appropriate encoder based
on the complexity-compression trade-off flexibilities provided
by the application and scenario.
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Malavika Bhaskaranand received her Ph.D. degree
in electrical and computer engineering from the Uni-
versity of California, Santa Barbara, in 2013, under
the supervision of Prof. Jerry D. Gibson. She received
the B.E. degree from the National Institute of Tech-
nology Karnataka, India, in 2004 and the M.S. de-
gree from the University of California, Santa Bar-
bara, in 2008. She was a Senior Development Engi-
neer with the Media Processing Group, Ittiam Sys-
tems in Bangalore from 2004 to 2007 where she de-
veloped video encoders, decoders, and transcoders on
embedded platforms. Her current research interests include video compression,
video processing, and image processing.
Jerry D. Gibson is Professor of Electrical and Com-
puter Engineering at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He has been an Associate Editor of the
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS and the
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY. He
was an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished
Lecturer for 2007–2008. He is an IEEE Fellow, and
he has received The Fredrick Emmons Terman Award
(1990), the 1993 IEEE Signal Processing Society
Senior Paper Award, the 2009 IEEE Technical Com-
mittee on Wireless Communications Recognition
Award, and the 2010 Best Paper Award from the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
MULTIMEDIA. He is the author, coauthor, and editor of several books, the most
recent of which are The Mobile Communications Handbook (Editor, 3rd ed.,
2012), Rate Distortion Bounds for Voice and Video (Coauthor with Jing Hu,
NOW Publishers, 2014), and Information Theory and Rate Distortion Theory
for Communications and Compression (Morgan-Claypool, 2014).