Information-theoretic research of video coding: theory and algorithms

视频通信是当今和未来工程发展的一个主要领域。只要看看日益普及的互联网电视、互联网视频会议和移动视频就知道了。然而，视频通信的一个关键问题是日益增长的视频数据量与日益短缺的带宽之间的冲突。在无线视频通信中尤其如此。的确，随着无线视频的日益普及以及高清电视和其他新兴视频应用的普及，带宽短缺变得越来越严重，以至于它被视为一个值得我们国家关注的问题。因此，对更好的视频编码技术有强烈的需求，这种技术可以显著提高压缩效率，同时提供其他绿色特性，如低复杂性（因此编码和解码功耗低）和可扩展性。

Video communications is a major area of growth in engineering today and in the future. Just look at the growing popularity of Internet TV, Internet video conferencing, and mobile video. A key problem in video communications, however, is the conflict between the growing data volume of video and the increasing shortage of bandwidth. This is particularly true in wireless video communications. Indeed, with the growing popularity of wireless video and the proliferation of high definition TV and other emerging new video applications, the bandwidth shortage becomes increasingly severe to the extent that it is regarded as an issue meriting our national attention. As such, there is strong demand for better video coding technologies which can improve compression efficiency significantly while providing other green features such as low complexity (hence low encoding and decoding power consumption) and scalability. Existing video coding standards are all based on the framework of predictive DCT-based video coding. Compression performance gains of these standards over their predecessors come largely from the improvements in their signal processing components---prediction/compensation and reconstruction filtering. Although one cannot rule out the possibility of further gains from this direction, it is certain that such gains, if any, are diminishing for given frame sizes and would come at extreme high computation complexity. Therefore, it is imperative to explore new directions and develop game-changing approaches to future generations of video coding. Building on our early success in both lossless and lossy compression and in developing information theoretic (IT) ideas and algorithms for image and video coding, in this research, we will investigate and explore game-changing approaches to video coding systematically from the IT point of view by proposing new advanced video coding frameworks, developing their respective information theory, and designing new efficient video coding algorithms.