PROJECT
DESCRIPTION
DISCOVER is a 27 month
project of the IST FET programme of the European Union within the
FP6/2002/IST/C Call.
Project start date:
September 1, 2005
Over the past decade several video coding technologies
have emerged to achieve great commercial success and it is widely expected that
digital video systems will completely replace all existing traditional analogue
based video systems during the next decade. DISCOVER will address the
development of several advanced digital video coding technologies which are
very likely to represent a breakthrough in new video coding application
scenarios.
Until now video coding research and standardization
have been adopting a video coding paradigm where it is the task of the encoder
to explore the source statistics, leading to a complexity balance where complex
encoders interact with simpler decoders. This paradigm is strongly dominated
and determined by applications such as broadcasting, video on demand, and video
streaming. Distributed Video Coding (DVC) adopts a completely different coding
paradigm by giving the decoder the task to exploit - partly or wholly - the
source statistics to achieve efficient compression. This change of paradigm
also moves the encoder-decoder complexity balance, allowing the provision of
efficient compression solutions with simple encoders and complex decoders.
This new coding paradigm, never considered by any
video coding standard, is particularly adequate to emerging applications such
as wireless video cameras and wireless low-power surveillance networks,
disposable video cameras, certain medical applications, sensor networks,
multi-view image acquisition, networked camcorders, etc., where low complexity
encoders are a must because memory, computational power, and energy are scarce.
The objective of DISCOVER is to explore and propose
new video coding schemes and tools in the area of Distributed Video Coding with
a strong potential for new applications, targeting new advances in coding
efficiency, error resiliency, scalability, and model based-video coding thus
paving the way for a breakthrough regarding the next video coding generation.
The objectives of DISCOVER will be achieved by
conducting a package of technical activities. Each of the technical activities
is concerned with innovative aspects of the project (theoretical developments,
application scenarios and functionalities, architecture specification, and
system integration, respectively).
The DISCOVER’s main
objectives are:
Theoretical developments
Application scenarios and functionalities
·
To identify application scenarios for which DVC may
bring major benefits
·
To identify and study which functionalities are
relevant for each application scenario, notably coding efficiency, error
resilience, graceful degradation, scalability, and encoder-decoder complexity
trade-off
Architecture specification
·
To design a system architecture that can accommodate
developed algorithms into complete and practical DVC systems
·
To design a system architecture specifically for
single camera systems
·
To design a system architecture specifically for
multiple camera systems
System integration
·
To develop a flexible software implementation that
will simulate various DISCOVER codecs for single as well as multiple camera
systems
·
To implement one DVC reference codec from the literature
Evaluation and
demonstration
·
To evaluate and to compare the DISCOVER codecs against
state of the art video coding
·
To demonstrate for single and multiple camera systems
the DISCOVER solutions