RTP payload format for H.264/SVC scalable video coding

The scalable extension of H.264/AVC, known as scalable video coding or SVC, is currently the main focus of the Joint Video Team’s work. In its present working draft, the higher level syntax of SVC follows the design principles of H.264/AVC. Self-contained network abstraction layer units (NAL units) form natural entities for packetization. The SVC specification is by no means finalized yet, but nevertheless the work towards an optimized RTP payload format has already started. RFC 3984, the RTP payload specification for H.264/AVC has been taken as a starting point, but it became quickly clear that the scalable features of SVC require adaptation in at least the areas of capability/operation point signaling and documentation of the extended NAL unit header. This paper first gives an overview of the history of scalable video coding, and then reviews the video coding layer (VCL) and NAL of the latest SVC draft specification. Finally, it discusses different aspects of the draft SVC RTP payload format, in- cluding the design criteria, use cases, signaling and payload structure.

A rate control scheme for H.264 video under low bandwidth channel

The dilemma of the quantization parameter (QP) being involved in both rate control and rate-distortion optimization (RDO) prevents using the traditional rate control scheme. Although some rate control schemes are proposed to circumvent the dilemma, the inaccurate prediction model and improper bit allocation deter H.264 application on low bandwidth channel. To resolve this issue, this paper proposes a novel rate control scheme by considering the macroblock (MB) encoding complexity variation and buffer variation and by exploiting the spatio-temporal correlation sufficiently well. Simulations showed that this scheme improves the perceptual quality of the pictures with similar or smaller PSNR deviations when compared to that of rate control in JVT-O016.

RTP-based broadcast streaming of high definition H.264/AVC video: an error robustness evaluation

In this work, we present an evaluation of the performance and error robustness of RTP-based broadcast streaming of high-quality high-definition (HD) H.264/AVC video. Using a fully controlled IP test bed (Hillestad et al., 2005), we broadcast high-definition video over RTP/UDP, and use an IP network emulator to introduce a varying amount of randomly distributed packet loss. A high-performance network interface monitoring card is used to capture the video packets into a trace file. Purpose-built software parses the trace file, analyzes the RTP stream and assembles the correctly received NAL units into an H.264/AVC Annex B byte stream file, which is subsequently decoded by JVT JM 10.1 reference software. The proposed measurement setup is a novel, practical and intuitive approach to perform error resilience testing of real-world H.264/AVC broadcast applications. Through a series of experiments, we evaluate some of the error resilience features of the H.264/AVC standard, and see how they perform at packet loss rates from 0.01% to 5%. The results confirmed that an appropriate slice partitioning scheme is essential to have a graceful degradation in received quality in the case of packet loss. While flexible macroblock ordering reduces the compression efficiency about 1 dB for our test material, reconstructed video quality is improved for loss rates above 0.25%.

RATE CONTROL ALGORITHM FOR H.264 VIDEO ENCODER

This letter proposes a rate control algorithm for H.264 video encoder, which is based on block activity and buffer state. Experimental results indicate that it has an excellent performance by providing much accurate bit rate and better coding efficiency compared with H.264. The computational complexity of the algorithm is reduced by adopting a novel block activity description method using the Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD) of 16× 16 mode, and its robustness is enhanced by introducing a feedback circuit at frame layer.

An H.264/AVC Video Watermarking Scheme in VLC Domain for Content Authentication

A semi-fragile content authentication algorithm is proposed for low bit-rate H.264/AVC video in VLC domain. Utilizing the intra prediction mode and coded block pattern in VLC domain, the proposed algorithm chooses those macro-blocks from which the signature is extracted and constructs content signature at macro-block level according to the relationship among the energies of quantized low-frequency coefficients of sub-macroblocks. The signature is embedded by modifying the trailing coefficients. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs well in visual quality impact and keep the bit-rate basically unchanged. In addition, the algorithm can embed signatures into I, P, B slices simultaneously and remarkably enhances the watermark capacity. By verifying the extracted signature, the algorithm can detect and locate video tampering efficiently.

Analysis of Video Quality Variation with Different Bit Rates of H.264 Compression

The study applied a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera to send video signals to 4 DaVinciTM development boards (TMS320DM6446) of Texas Instruments (TI) to carry out H.264 Baseline Profile video coding. One of the development boards coded in the Variable Bit Rate (VBR) mode, and the other three development boards coded in the Constant Bit Rate (CBR) mode. In addition, the constant rates are 2 Mbps, 1.5 Mbps and 1 Mbps respectively. The H.264 video compression files produced by the boards were analyzed via video analysis software (CodecVisa) in the study. This software can analyze and present the compression data characteristics of the video files under each video frame, i.e., bits/MB, QP, and PSNR. In this research, the characteristics of data of each frame under four different compression conditions were compared. Their differences were calculated and averaged, and the standard deviation was evaluated. It was further connected with the values of quality characteristics and the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of each frame to analyze the relation among the frame quality, the compression rate of CBR, as well as the quantitative granularity. The preliminary conclusion of the study is that the compression behaviors of CBRs in different coding sources are adjusted in a specific proportion in order to cope with the change in frame complexity. The frame will be severely damaged by a critical value during the process of network transmission while the source rate is less than the value of the characteristic.

Content-adaptive robust error concealment for packet-lossy H.264 video streaming

In this paper, we present a spatio-temporal post-processing error concealment (EC) algorithm designed initially for a H.264 video-streaming scheme over packet-lossy networks. It aims at optimizing the subjective quality of the restored video under the constraints of low delay and computational complexity, which are critical to real-time applications and portable devices having limited resources. Specifically, it takes into consideration the physical property of motion field in order to achieve more meaningful perceptual video quality, in addition to the improved objective PSNR. Further, a simple bilinear spatial interpolation approach is combined with the improved boundary-match (B-M) based temporal EC approach according to texture and motion activity analysis. Finally, we propose a low complexity temporal EC method based on motion vector interpolation as a replacement of the B-M based approach in the scheme under low-computation requirement, or as a complement to further improve the scheme's performance in applications having enough computation resources. Extensive experiments demonstrated that the proposal features not only better reconstruction, objectively and subjectively, than JM benchmark, but also robustness to different video sequences.

New Fragile Watermarking Technique to Identify Inserted Video Objects Using H.264 and Color Features

The transmission of video content over a network raises various issues relating to copyright authenticity,ethics,legality,and privacy.The protection of copyrighted video content is a significant issue in the video industry,and it is essential to find effective solutions to prevent tampering and modification of digital video content during its transmission through digital media.However,there are stillmany unresolved challenges.This paper aims to address those challenges by proposing a new technique for detectingmoving objects in digital videos,which can help prove the credibility of video content by detecting any fake objects inserted by hackers.The proposed technique involves using two methods,the H.264 and the extraction color features methods,to embed and extract watermarks in video frames.The study tested the performance of the system against various attacks and found it to be robust.The evaluation was done using different metrics such as Peak-Signal-to-Noise Ratio(PSNR),Mean Squared Error(MSE),Structural Similarity Index Measure(SSIM),Bit Correction Ratio(BCR),and Normalized Correlation.The accuracy of identifying moving objects was high,ranging from 96.3%to 98.7%.The system was also able to embed a fragile watermark with a success rate of over 93.65%and had an average capacity of hiding of 78.67.The reconstructed video frames had high quality with a PSNR of at least 65.45 dB and SSIMof over 0.97,making them imperceptible to the human eye.The system also had an acceptable average time difference(T=1.227/s)compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

H.264/AVC error resilience tools suitable for 3G mobile video services

The emergence of third generation mobile system (3G) makes video transmission in wireless environment possible, and the latest 3GPP/3GPP2 standards require 3G terminals support H.264/AVC. Due to high packet loss rate in wireless envi- ronment, error resilience for 3G terminals is necessary. Moreover, because of the hardware restrictions, 3G mobile terminals support only part of H.264/AVC error resilience tool. This paper analyzes various error resilience tools and their functions, and presents 2 error resilience strategies for 3G mobile streaming video services and mobile conversational services. Performances of the proposed error resilience strategies were tested using off-line common test conditions. Experiments showed that the proposed error resilience strategies can yield reasonably satisfactory results.

Reversible Data Hiding Based on Run-Level Coding in H.264/AVC Video Streams

This paper presents a reversible data hiding(RDH)method,which is designed by combining histogram modification(HM)with run-level coding in H.264/advanced video coding(AVC).In this scheme,the run-level is changed for embedding data into H.264/AVC video sequences.In order to guarantee the reversibility of the proposed scheme,the last nonzero quantized discrete cosine transform(DCT)coefficients in embeddable 4×4 blocks are shifted by the technology of histogram modification.The proposed scheme is realized after quantization and before entropy coding of H.264/AVC compression standard.Therefore,the embedded information can be correctly extracted at the decoding side.Peak-signal-noise-to-ratio(PSNR)and Structure similarity index(SSIM),embedding payload and bit-rate variation are exploited to measure the performance of the proposed scheme.Experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme leads to less SSIM variation and bit-rate increase.

Very Low Bit-Rate Video Coding by Combining H.264/AVC Standard and 2-D Discrete Wavelet Transform

In this paper, we propose a new method for very low bit-rate video coding that combines H.264/AVC standard and two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform. In this method, first a two dimensional wavelet transform is applied on each video frame independently to extract the low frequency components for each frame and then the low frequency parts of all frames are coded using H.264/AVC codec. On the other hand, the high frequency parts of the video frames are coded by Run Length Coding algorithm, after applying a threshold to neglect the low value coefficients. Experiments show that our proposed method can achieve better rate-distortion performance at very low bit-rate applications below 16 kbits/s compared to applying H.264/AVC standard directly to all frames. Applications of our proposed video coding technique include video telephony, video-conferencing, transmitting or receiving video over half-rate traffic channels of GSM networks.

富士通微电子推出新型超低功耗全高清H．264 CODEC芯片

富士通微电子（上海）有限公司近日宣布推出两款新型大规模集成电路（LSI），可支持全高清视频（1920点×1 080行）的H．264格式下的编、解码．这两款产品扩充了其在H．264（＊1）CODECLSI产品的阵容。

MB86H55／56：全高清H.264 CODEC芯片

富士通微电子推出两款新型大规模集成电路（LSI），可支持全高清视频（1920点×1080行）的H．264格式下的编、解码，这两款产品扩充了其在H．264 CODEC LSI产品的阵容。MB86H55芯片将率先推出，该芯片在低功耗方面具有行业领先水平，在进行全高清编码时，包含内置存储器的功耗总共为500mW。此外，即将推出的MB86H56芯片可支持处理全高清视频（簿秒60帧（逐行扫描））（60p），可进一步提高图像画质。

超低功耗全高清H．264 CODEC芯片

MB86H55和MB86H56两款CODEC可支持全高清视频（1920×1080）的H．264格式下的编解码。这两款产品中均内置存储器，封装仅为15mm×15mm，适合便携式设备（如数字摄像机）、网络家电、商用广播设备及安全监控相机记录、播放并传输高画质高清视频。

富士通微电子推出全高清H．264CODEC芯片

富士通微电子（上海）有限公司今日宣布推出两款新型大规模集成电路，可支持全高清视频（1，920点×1,080行）的H．264格式下的编、解码，这两款产品扩充了其在H．264（^＊1）CODECLSI产品的阵容。其中一款具有超低功耗性能的芯片-MB86H55芯片将率先推出，该芯片在低功耗方面具有行业领先水平，在进行全高清编码时，包含内置存储器的功耗总共仅为500mw。

新型超低功耗全高清H．264 CODEC

富士通微电子（上海）有限公司推出两款新型大规模集成电路（LSI）。可支持全高清视频（1920点X1080行）的H．264格式下的编、解码，这两款产品扩充了其在H．264CODECLSI产品的阵容。其中一款具有超低功耗性能的器件-MB86H55率先推出．该器件在低功耗方面具有行业领先水平，在进行全高清编码时，包含内置存储器的功耗总共仅为500mW。此外．即将推出的MB86H56可支持处理全高清视频（每秒60帧（逐行扫描））（60p），可进一步提高图像画质。

H.264/AVC码率控制现状与发展

作为视频通信中非常重要的关键技术之一,码率控制用于调整视频码流以满足带宽受限的条件,能够直接影响视频编码器输出码率的稳定性和保证视频质量。首先描述码率控制问题,给出码率控制算法的分类准则;然后对众多的H.264/先进视频编码(advanced video coding,AVC)码率控制算法根据应用目的进行具体描述;最后从适用标准和应用目的两个方面,详细指出码率控制技术今后的研究方向。

一种基于H.264/AVC的视频可逆脆弱水印算法

结合H.264压缩编码标准的特性,该文提出一种新的基于H.264/AVC的视频可逆脆弱水印算法。算法先计算当前宏块预测残差块量化的离散余弦变换(DCT)系数的哈希值生成认证码,再把认证码作为水印信息嵌入到下一个相邻宏块活性最大的4′4块的最后一个非零量化DCT系数中。在解码端,通过比较认证码和提取的水印信息进行视频数据完整性的认证。实验结果表明,该算法对视频质量和码率的影响较小,并且能对认证通过的视频数据进行还原和对认证失败的视频Ⅰ帧遭篡改区域进行有效的定位。

基于3G和H.264技术的无线视频监控系统

针对网络视频监控设备的实际应用需求,融合视频压缩、嵌入式系统和无线通信等相关技术,设计实现了基于3G技术的H.264无线视频监控系统。该监控系统实现了视频数据的采集、压缩与网络传输以及编解码等功能。由于H.264标准中码率控制策略过于强调通用性而没有考虑无线网络的误码率高、抖动性大以及嵌入式终端的处理能力有限的因素,本系统在实现了H.264标准中码率控制策略的基础上进行了优化。实验表明,在码率没有明显增加的情况下,图像PSNR值有所提高,从而较好地实现了码率控制效果。