Advanced Motion Estimation Techniques for Video Coding

C.-C. Jay Kuo

University of Southern California

Time: October 26 (Tuesday) 14:30

Address: Xindian Building 215

Motion vector (MV) estimation plays a critical role in reducing temporal redundancy of video coding. In this talk, I will present adaptive techniques for MV estimation developed by my group at USC recently: 1) optimal subpel motion resolution decision and direct subpel MV position estimation and 2) MV search range selection. For the first topic, we characterize the shape of the error surface in a local region with its flatness and narrowness to determine the optimal subpel MV. By exploiting this shape information, we propose a block-based subpel MV resolution estimation method that allows each block to choose its optimal subpel MV resolution for the optimal rate-distortion (R-D) performance adaptively. We then propose two MV position prediction schemes for ill- and well-conditioned error surfaces, respectively.  All proposed subpel MV estimation techniques are direct methods, where no iteration is required. For the second topic, we study accurate motion vector (MV) prediction with a small search window size for memory-constrained systems.  The spatial and temporal correlations of MVs are first investigated.  Then, effective algorithms are developed to determine the location, size and shape of a search window for each macroblock. The trade-off between the search window size & shape and coded video quality is analyzed. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of these novel MV estimation techniques.

Biography of Dr. C.-C. Jay Kuo

Dr. C.-C. Jay Kuo received the Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. He is now with the University of Southern California (USC) as Director of Signal and Image Processing Institute and Professor of EE, CS and Mathematics. His research interests are in the areas of digital media processing, multimedia compression, communication and networking technologies, and embedded multimedia system design. Dr. Kuo is a Fellow of IEEE and SPIE. Dr. Kuo has guided about 105 students to their Ph.D. degrees and supervised 20 postdoctoral research fellows. Currently, his research group at USC consists of around 30 Ph.D. students (see website http://viola.usc.edu), which is one of the largest academic research groups in multimedia technologies. He is a co-author of about 180 journal papers, 800 conference papers and 10 books. Dr. Kuo is Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, and has served as Editor for 10 other journals. Dr. Kuo received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award (NYI) and Presidential Faculty Fellow (PFF) Award in 1992 and 1993, respectively. He received the best paper awards from the multimedia communication Technical Committee of the IEEE Communication Society in 2005, from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Fall Conference (VTC-Fall) in 2006, and from IEEE Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing (IIH-MSP) in 2006. He was an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2006, and a recipient of the Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2007.