The 13th IASTED International Conference on
Signal and Image Processing
SIP 2011
December 14 – 16, 2011
Dallas, USA
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Advances in Perceptual Coding of Digital Pictures
Abstract
When William M. Goodall of Bell Laboratories reported at IRE1 National Convention in 1949 his implementation of the world-first digital video system (using PCM or pulse code modulation)2,3, few would know about it, let alone realize that the end of the analogue television (TV) which was beheld with fascination then by the general population around the globe had just been announced, and that replacing the analogue television will be a flurry of digital visual communication and entertainment applications imaginable or considered possible at the time. Wait we must, however, for four more decades before the first international (i.e., ITU-T H.261 and JPEG) standards start to emerge for digital picture compression, which are followed by a proliferation of digital picture compression products and applications as we are witnessing today, including video telephony, video conferencing, digital TV broadcasting, IPTV, IP CCTV, video streaming and on-demand services, DVD and high definition (HD) and 3-D DVD/Blu-ray products, broadband wireless and multimedia communications.Human visual system (HVS) based perceptual picture (including images and videos) coding research and development has been an important and very challenging topic in both theory and practice since the very beginning. Its importance, relevance and urgency have become increasingly obvious to research and professional communities and industries in order to develop future generations of high quality picture coding standards, products, systems and applications such as super- or ultra-high definition (SHD or UHD) imaging and video systems, digital cinema distribution systems, 3-D video/TV, immersive interactive visual systems, and medical imaging and archive systems for telemedicine/telehealth applications. It is high time the visual communication services and entertainment be transformed from the “best efforts” to quality assured practice for the associated industries to be sustainable in the long run.
The speaker will address theoretical origin and premise of HVS based perceptual picture coding, trace the historical and up-to-date developments of philosophy, approaches/methods, techniques and milestones in perceptual coding of digital pictures, and highlight a number of theoretical and practical challenges in this fascinating area in a field of engineering and technology which has been transforming our way of life.
Discussions on theoretical origin and premise of perceptual picture coding are developed around three fundamental concepts/issues, i.e., information entropy4 and perceptual entropy5, statistical redundancies reduction and psychovisual redundancies reduction, and conventional rate-distortion optimization and rate-perceptual-distortion optimization6. The overview of perceptual coding of images and videos examines the approaches and the frameworks introduced for perceptual picture coders to date, identifying gaps in relation to perceptually lossless and perceptually lossy coding, perceptual coding of monochrome and colour images, and intra-frame and inter-frame or inter-view video coding. Challenges and issues requiring inter-disciplinary research efforts will be raised including HVS modeling and adaptation to digital picture compression and processing, suitable and/or new mathematical framework for HVS modeling used in both picture quality assessment and compression engine, standard practice for large sample supra-threshold subjective tests and database setting reference picture quality scales in terms of JND (just noticeable difference) levels or steps, quantitative definition of perceptual entropy and theoretical lower bound for perceptually lossless digital picture compression.
Biography of the Keynote Speaker
Hong Ren Wu received his BEng. and MEng. from University of Science and Technology, Beijing (formerly Beijing University of Iron and Steel Technology), P.R. China, in 1982 and 1985, respectively. He received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wollongong, N.S.W. Australia, in 1990.
Dr. Wu was on academic staff of Chisholm Institute of Technology and then Monash University, Melbourne, Australia from April 1990 to January 2005, last as an Associate Professor in Digital Systems. Since February 2005, Dr Wu has been with Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, as Professor of Visual Communications Engineering, serving concurrently from 2005 to 2010 as Discipline Head of Computer and Network Engineering in School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Professor Wu’s research interests include fast DSP (digital signal processing) algorithms, digital picture compression and quality assessment, video processing and enhancment, embedded DSP systems and their industrial applications. He has published extensively in refereed journals as well as conferences. His significant contributions in the areas relevant to digital picture compression and quality assessment include identification and definition of digital video stationary area temporal fluctuation coding artefacts in 1995-1997, the no-reference HVS (human visual system) based picture blocking metric in 1996-1997, the multi-channel vision model based video blocking impairment metric in 2000-2002, the multi-channel vision model based video ringing impairment metric in 2003, vision model based perceptual image coding in 2001-2004, perceptually lossless coding of medical images in 2003-2006, perceptual colour image coding in 2003-2010, and post-filtering for reduction of digital video temporal fluctuation artefacts in 2008-2010.
Professor Wu is a co-editor of the book, Digital Video Image Quality and Perceptual Coding, CRC Press, 2006 (ISBN: 0-8247-2777-0). He is a guest editor for the special issue on Multimedia Communication Services, Circuits, Systems and Signal Processing, No. 3, 2001, the special issue on “Quality Issues on Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting” of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, Vol. 54, No.3, Pt II, September 2008, and the special issue on “QoE Management in Emerging Multimedia Services” of IEEE Communications Magazine, April 2012.
