Date: September 3, 2004
Time: 3-4 pm
Location: GCATT Room 119C
Speaker(s): Dr. David Malah
Signal and Image Processing Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering
Technion, Haifa, Israel
Title: Transrating of Coded Video Signals via Optimized Requantization
Abstract:
Requantization is one of the tools for bit-rate reduction of pre-encoded video to adapt it to various network bandwidth constraints. Several recent works propose using Lagrangian optimization to find the optimal quantization step for each coded macro-block, to meet a desired rate at minimum distortion. We propose to extend the Lagrangian optimization procedure by allowing the modification of quantized coefficients index values, including setting their values to zero, in addition to quantization step-size selection. Coefficient index value modification and quantization step-size selection are optimally done using a low-complexity trellis-based procedure in an MPEG-2 context. The proposed requantization algorithm provides higher PSNR values than the Lagrangian-based optimization method, which only handles the selection of quantization steps, and still does not exceed considerably its complexity. We also report on combining MSE and MAP requantization methods, which are based on the estimated distribution of the DCT coefficients, with the different optimization algorithms.

*Joint work with Michael Lavrentiev

Bio:
David Malah Received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in 1964 and 1967, respectively,from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, and the PhD degree in 1971 from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, all in Electrical Engineering. During 1971-72 he was an Assistant Professor at the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada. In 1972 he joined the Electrical Engineering Department of the Technion, where he is a Professor, holding the Elbit/Elron Chair in Electrical Engineering.

During the period 1979 to 1996 he spent about 5 years, cumulatively, of sabbaticals and summer leaves at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ, performing research in the areas of Speech and Image Communication. During the summer of 1998 and the academic year 2000-2001 he was on a sabbatical leave at AT&T Labs, Florham Park NJ, at the Speech Processing Research lab.

Since 1975 he has been the academic head of the Signal and Image Processing Laboratory (SIPL), at the Technion, EE Dept., which is active in Image and Speech Communication research and education. His main research interests are in Image, Video, Speech and Audio Coding; Speech Enhancement; Image Processing; Digital Watermarking, and in Digital Signal Processing techniques.

He is a Fellow member of the IEEE since 1987.