Prof. Sze will be giving a tutorial at IEEE ISCAS 2014 with Dr. Madhukar Budagavi on “Design and Implementation of Next Generation Video Coding Systems” - Energy-Efficient Multimedia Systems Group

Slides [ pdf ]

Tutorial Abstract: Advances in video compression, which have enabled us to squeeze more pixels through bandwidth-constrained channels, have been critical in the rapid growth of video. As we continue to push for higher coding efficiency, higher resolutions and more sophisticated multimedia applications, the required number of computations per pixel and pixel processing rate will grow exponentially. This poses significant power and performance challenges for battery operated devices such as smart phones and tablets, as well as emerging devices such as wearable cameras/displays and video sensors. In order to address these challenges, co-design of algorithms and architectures is required for next generation video coding systems.

The first part of the tutorial will give a background on video coding and provide an overview of existing video coding systems and their applications, particularly for H.264/AVC which is currently the most widely used video coding standard in the world. It will cover implementations on a variety of platforms including ASIC, FPGA and multi-core processors. The key challenges in the design and implementation of these systems will be highlighted. The techniques used to improve energy-efficiency and performance in the current state-of-the-art implementations and the limitations of these techniques will be described.

The second part of the tutorial will then introduce the next generation video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), recently standardized in January 2013. It will provide insight on how joint algorithm and architecture design was used in the development of HEVC to overcome various implementation challenges while still enabling a 2x improvement in coding efficiency compared to H.264/AVC. Various implementation-friendly features will be highlighted. The impact of co-design will be illustrated through various HEVC encoder and decoder implementations.

The final part of the tutorial will provide examples of how video coding can be used a wide variety of emerging applications, and discuss the future directions and challenges that lie ahead.