Communicating Pictures

Communicating Pictures starts with a unique historical perspective of the role of images in communications and then builds on this to explain the applications and requirements of a modern video coding system. It draws on the author's extensive academic and professional experience of signal processing and video coding to deliver a text that is algorithmically rigorous, yet accessible, relevant to modern standards, and practical. It offers a thorough grounding in visual perception, and demonstrates how modern image and video compression methods can be designed in order to meet the rate-quality performance levels demanded by today's applications, networks and users.With this book you will learn: - Practical issues when implementing a codec, such as picture boundary extension and complexity reduction, with particular emphasis on efficient algorithms for transforms, motion estimators and error resilience - Conflicts between conventional video compression, based on variable length coding and spatiotemporal prediction, and the requirements for error resilient transmission - How to assess the quality of coded images and video content, both through subjective trials and by using perceptually optimised objective metrics - Features, operation and performance of the state-of-the-art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard - Covers the basics of video communications and includes a strong grounding in how we perceive images and video, and how we can exploit redundancy to reduce bitrate and improve rate distortion performance - Gives deep insight into the pitfalls associated with the transmission of real-time video over networks (wireless and fixed) - Uses the state-of- the-art video coding standard (H.264/AVC) as a basis for algorithm development in the context of block based compression - Insight into future video coding standards such as the new ISO/ITU High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) initiative, which extends and generalizes the H.264/AVC approach

Professor David R. Bull PhD, FIET, FIEEE, CEng. obtained his PhD from the University of Cardiff in 1988. He currently holds the Chair in Signal Processing at the University of Bristol where he is head of the Visual Information Laboratory and Director of Bristol Vision Institute, a group of some 150 researchers in vision science, spanning engineering, psychology, biology, medicine and the creative arts. In 1996 David helped to establish the UK DTI Virtual Centre of Excellence in Digital Broadcasting and Multimedia Technology and was one of its Directors from 1997-2000. He has also advised Government through membership of the UK Foresight Panel, DSAC and the HEFCE Research Evaluation Framework. He is also now Director of the UK Government's new MyWorld Strength in Places programme. David has worked widely across image and video processing focused on streaming, broadcast and wireless applications. He has published over 600 academic papers, various articles and 4 books and has given numerous invited/keynote lectures and tutorials. He has also received awards including the IEE Ambrose Fleming Premium for his work on Primitive Operator Digital Filters and a best Paper Award for his work on Link Adaptation for Video Transmission. David's work has been exploited commercially and he has acted as a consultant for companies and governments across the globe. In 2001, he co-founded ProVision Communication Technologies Ltd., who launched the world's first robust multi-source wireless HD sender for consumer use. His recent award-winning and pioneering work on perceptual video compression using deep learning, has produced world-leading rate-quality performance.