Video Transcoding for Mobile Telephony



2005 Project Report

In the last few years, telecommunication systems are gaining increasing importance in everyday life. Many new digital multimedia communication services and devices, such as videomessaging, videoconference, gaming, remote teaching and digital television, have appeared in the market.

It is needed to adapt the media content to different network characteristics, channel bandwidth and access terminals in order to enable delivery with acceptable service quality. Video transcoder's aim is to convey an incoming compressed video bitstream to the outgoing link without the need of fully decoding and re-encoding (a very time- and processing-consuming activity).

A typical application of video transcoding process

Video transcoding for Mobile, fig. 1

Video transcoding converts a compressed video bit stream:

The goal of this project is to develop efficient solutions for achieve an optimal video quality in real-time video transcoding.


Next (third) generation of mobile telephone systems are based on CDMA radio channel access technique that adapt dynamically the channel bandwidth according to the number of users. We investigate new transcoding solutions in order to have a good quality of the video communications forced to smaller channel bandwidth.

We started with studying MPEG-4 video codec and with implementing two temporal video transcoding architectures together with new frame skipping policies. Successively we built an implementation of the same temporal transcoder based on H.263 codec. Moreover, we done an exaustive testing of all architectures combined with all policies.
Currently, we are studying the new H.264 codec and we try to combine the temporal with the quality transcoding.



Transcoding in mobile telephony for channel bandwidth reduction


Video transcoding for Mobile, fig. 2


Contacts:
Maurizio Bonuccelli, bonucce at di dot unipi dot it
Francesca Lonetti, francesca dot lonetti at isti dot cnr dot it
Francesca Martelli, francesca dot martelli at isti dot cnr dot it


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