Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 12
Hot Research Topics in Video Coding
and Systems
This chapter provides a brief overview of the recent hot research topics and
challenges in video coding and systems. This chapter consists of four parts. The
first part introduces the perceptual coding-related technology, and the second part
details the emerging Internet media-oriented coding. The third part talks about the
future challenges and the last part summarizes this chapter.
12.1 Introduction
Efficient compression of video signals has received much interest from both
academic and industry over the past 30 years. It is widely believed that this field
is becoming mature as diversity of products has been developed. However, the
dramatically increasing of the video communication applications are still creating
stronger demand for digital video services, such as high-definition television, web-
based television, and video-on-demand. These services require to significantly reduce
the storage space and bandwidth of visual content production, storage, and delivery.
Recently, many video coding algorithms aiming to improve the coding efficiency
have been proposed. The purpose of this chapter is to review these advanced tech-
niques and discuss the hot research topics of video coding, which may potentially
provide more solutions for the next generation standard.
12.2 Perceptual Coding
Since the ultimate receiver of video is the Human Visual System (HVS), in video
coding, the correct optimization goal is the visual quality of the reconstructed
video. However, as our knowledge of the HVS and statistics of natural images
remains quite limited, the perceived distortion is difficult to measure. Recently,
many research efforts have been devoted to developing accurate visual quality
