Information-theoretic research of video coding: theory and algorithms

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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.