SHVC, the Scalable Extensions of HEVC,and Its Applications

This paper discusses SHVC, the scalable extension of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, and its applications in broadcasting and wireless broadband multimedia services. SHVC was published as part of the second version of the HEVC specifi?cation in 2014. Since its publication, SHVC has been evaluated by application standards development organizations (SDOs) for its potential benefits in video applications, such as terrestrial and mobile broadcasting in ATSC 3.0, as well as a variety of 3GPP mul?timedia services, including multi?party multi?stream video conferencing (MMVC), multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS), and dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH). This paper provides a brief overview of SHVC and the performance and com?plexity analyses of using SHVC in these video applications.

UMB Network Architecture

Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) radio-access technology enables efficient wireless transfer of IP packets at very high data rates while providing seamless mobility and best Quality of Service (QoS), even at the cell edges, without lowering frequency re-use. UMB systems benefit from a highly innovative flat network architecture that simplifies the core network and network interfaces, making it easy to scale the network. One of the key principles for UMB architecture is seamless mobility. A major emphasis is placed on the design of network architecture to facilitate seamless handoffs both within the UMB network and across different technologies. Innovative concepts enable fast switching between base stations while minimizing overhead and offering simpler network interfaces. New tunneling mechanisms provide signaling exchange at the data-link layer (layer 2) and IP layer (layer 3) to enable faster mobility across the base stations. This paper discusses key features of UMB network architecture, and provides insight into various architecture design choices.

UMB/LTE Applications and Services

As the next-generation mobile broadband networks, Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) continue to improve the mobile broadband performance and capacity by allowing operators to leverage new spectrum with wider bandwidths of 10 MHz and more. This will in turn enable the operators to address exciting market opportunities and service proliferation in high tele-density areas. This article discusses the drivers for the next-generation mobile broadband networks, and market opportunities of UMB and LTE. There are at least three key drivers for the networks: increasing device capabilities; growing mobile data consumption; and maintaining operator profitability. The opportunities include laptops, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and fixed broadband access, premium Video on Demand (VOD)/Music on Demand (MOD) services, multimedia upload and exchange services, consumer electronics and business applications for vertical markets.

Feature-Adaptive Rendering of Loop Subdivision Surfaces on Modern GPUs

We present a novel approach for real-time rendering Loop subdivision surfaces on modern graphics hardware. Our algorithm evaluates both positions and normals accurately, thus providing the true Loop subdivision surface. The core idea is to recursively refine irregular patches using a GPU compute kernel. All generated regular patches are then directly evaluated and rendered using tile hardware tessellation unit. Our approach handles triangular control meshes of arbitrary topologies and incorporates common subdivision surface features such as semi-sharp creases and hierarchical edits. While surface rendering is accurate up to machine precision, we also enforce a consistent bitwise evaluation of positions and normals at patch boundaries. This is particularly useful in the context of displacement mapping which strictly requires inatching surface normals. Furthermore, we incorporate efficient level-of-detail rendering where subdivision depth and tessellation density can be adjusted on-the-fly. Overall, our algorithm provides high-quality results at real-time frame rates, thus being ideally suited to interactive rendering applications such as video games or authoring tools.