Video coding and transcoding for multimedia communications

Dott. Francesca Lonetti
Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione “Alessandro Faedo”, Area della Ricerca di Pisa del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

15 hours, 4 credits

June 29 - July 2, 2009

Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione: Elettronica, Informatica, Telecomunicazioni, Largo Lucio Lazzarino (formerly via Diotisalvi), meeting room

   

Aims

The great development of interactive and multimedia services, such as digital TV broadcasting, distance learning, video on demand, video telephony and multipoint video conferencing, is due to the improved digital video technologies in compression (encoding) and decompression (decoding). Highly efficient and scalable video coding standards (MPEG-4, H.263, H.264) provide a manageable size for transmission or storage of bandwidth-intensive digital video.

In heterogeneous networks, transcoding is able to adapt “on-the-fly” the media content to different network resources and device characteristics. To enable interoperability and guarantee the quality of multimedia services, different kinds of video transcoding are required, depending on bandwidth constraints, processing and display capabilities of access devices. Video transcoding can provide format conversion, resolution scaling, bit rate conversion (quality transcoding), frame rate conversion (temporal transcoding). The goal of this series of lectures is to provide an overview of video coding and transcoding issues, addressing the aspects related to the video transmission in different network settings: infrastructured, ad-hoc and vehicular networks.

Syllabus

  • Video coding concepts (2 hours)
  • The video coding standards: MPEG-4, H.263, H.264 (2 hours)
  • Video transmission in mobile systems: issues and constraints (2 hours)
  • Video transcoding architectures (2 hours)
  • Quality transcoding (2 hours)
  • Temporal transcoding (2 hours)
  • Video transmission in ad-hoc and vehicular networks: solutions, recent projects and open problems (3 hours)