An Efficient Video Compression System Based on LSK

Encoder

1
S.Anantha Padmanabhan and 2Dr. S.Chandramathi
1
Assistant Professor, Department of Electronics
SEA College of Engineering, Bangalore, India
E-mail: ananthapadmanbhanphd@gmail.com
2
Professor and Head, Department of Electronics
SRI Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore, India

Abstract. Video compression means reducing the size of data in order to

represent the digital video images. The main goal of our research is to develop a
robust video compression system. To begin with, wavelet decomposition is
applied to the I-frame and using the Listless SPECK (LSK) algorithm, the
resulting coefficients are quantized. Subsequently, an Adaptive Rood Search
with Spatio-Temporal Correlation technique (ARS-ST) is employed for motion
estimation. Finally, the difference between the original P-frame and the
predicted P-frame is computed, which is referred as the residual. The proposed
video compression technique is assessed by several videos and the effectiveness
of compression is evaluated by measuring the PSNR values for the compression
results.
Keywords: Video compression, Listless SPECK (LSK), motion estimation,
Adaptive Rood Search with Spatio temporal Correlation (ARS-ST), Motion
Vector Prediction.

1 Introduction

Image and video coding plays a significant role in several multimedia applications.
Because of the popularity of the internet, there has been a tremendous increase in the
use of video in digital form over the past few years [1, 2]. It is not possible to store the
full digital video without processing, because the memory of the storage devices and
the bandwidth of the transmission channel are not infinite to accommodate the very
large quantity of digital video data [4, 9]. To circumvent these problems, and to
decrease the number of bits required to represent a digital video data while
maintaining an acceptable fidelity or video quality a series of techniques called video
compression techniques have been proposed. The compression ratio quantifies their
ability to perform this task [5, 11]. Video compression is a combination of spatial
image compression and temporal motion compensation and it refers to decreasing the
quantity of data required to represent digital video images. For the purpose of
reducing the quantity of data and to provide the adequate quality several video
compression algorithms have been developed. Effectively compressing the video is
the main objective of this research. In our proposed work, a transform coding

V.V. Das and N. Thankachan (Eds.): CIIT 2011, CCIS 250 pp. 121–128, 2011.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
 S Anantha Padmanabhan and S Chandramathi 122

technique LSK Listless SPECK (LSK) based on wavelets is used for compression of
I-frame [8]. Here LSK is the enhanced version of Set Partition Embedded bloCK
(SPECK). The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 describes some of
the recent related works. Section 3 briefs the proposed video compression process.
Experimental results and analysis of the proposed methodology are discussed in
Section 4. Finally, concluding remarks are provided in Section 5.

2 A Survey of Recent Research in the Field

In this section, a brief review of some important contributions from the existing
literature is presented. Mohammed Benabdellah et al. [6] have investigated the
selection of reference images in the process of video compression, by utilizing only
the intra and predicted images which are extracted from sequences. Faber-schauder
Multi-scale Transform (FMT) has been applied for intra and predicted image. Then,
by subtracting the corresponding images transformed by FMT, each image has been
compared with other images. Bruno Carpentieri et al. [7] have reviewed the Split-
Merge technique that utilizes the temporal correlation between frames, retaining the
spatial correlation between the elements of each frame. Their method has been based
on segmentation of the frames into uneven sized regions known as super blocks Ilker
Kilic et al. [10] have proposed a video compression algorithm at low bit rates,
comparable to the standard techniques. The overlapping block motion compensation
(OBMC) has been combined with discrete wavelet transform which was followed by
Lloyd–Max quantization and Zero Tree Wavelet (ZTW) structure. Sudhakar
Radhakrishnan et al. [12] have discussed that video coding schemes are highly
important for low bit rates and the block transform employed, traditional coding
schemes have blocking artifacts problems. Because they have proposed a wavelet
transform based Video Codec, the performance of the coder has been superior to
block transform based codecs. Esakkirajan Sankaralingam et al. [13] have proposed a
new video coding method using multi wavelet transform and multi-stage vector
quantization. Spatial, temporal and psycho visual redundancies have been the three
types of common redundancies in video sequences. They have used the multi wavelet
transform to minimize the spatial redundancy.

3 An Efficient Video Compression Based on LSK and ARS-ST

The video is a set of frames of size M  N that can be represented

as f j (x, y) : j  1,2,  , N f , x  0,1,2,  , M and y  0,1,2,  , N where, N f is the total
number of frames present in the video.
123 An Efficient Video Compression System

3.1. Wavelet Based Compression of I-Frames Using LSK

A set of images representing a moving scene is a set of temporal samples The

reference frames is the intra coded I-frame and the predicted frames are the P-frames
[15]. LSK [20] represents Listless Set Partitioning Embedded block. Same block
partitioning rules used by SPECK are also used by LSK. By placing markers at all
initial pixels for all the sub-bands, partitioning of set ‘I’ into three ‘S’ sets is modified
in the proposed algorithm [3]. Though the proposed LSK algorithm employs some
minimum number of bits to specify the insignificant sub-band blocks in the initial
passes, the required computational time and complexity are similar to that of SPECK
[14]. This paper describes a new video codec called LSK that uses the Set Partitioning
rules of SPECK, and does an explicit breadth first search without using lists.
In Storage and State table markers, the DC band, the number of coefficients is
determined as I dc  R dc C dc where R dc  R 2 L , C dc  C2 L , L is the number of
sub-band decomposition levels. In order to keep track of the set partitions, the
following markers are kept in the 2 bit per coefficient state table mark . Each element
of mark indicates something about the corresponding element in the val image array,
if it signifies a block. Each marker and its meaning are listed as MIP : The pixel is
unimportant or untested for this bit-plane, MNP : The pixel is newly important, so it
will not be refined for this bit-plane, MSP : The pixel is important and will be
refined in this bit plane, MS2 : The block is of size 2 × 2, i.e., 4 elements to be
skipped.
In Initialization, Floating point transform coefficients are quantized to integers by
performing a dyadic sub band transform on the image, with L=5 levels. After that, the
transform is read into the linear array val . The entire two-dimensional transform
matrix is mapped into one-dimensional array and it can be found for each r, c  by bit
interleaving and the corresponding coefficients can be moved. Each coefficient is
marked with MIP and first element of every full sized block with MS* markers to
initialize the state table, i.e., mark[i]  MIP and, mark[i  j]  MS2 Where,
L
j  0,1,2, , e and elog 2 (m / 2 )

Encoder Algorithm
The main encoder algorithm performed for each bit-plane, b , starting with B and
decremented to 0 , or until a bit budget is met. There are three passes in the algorithm.
They are 1) Insignificant Pixel pass 2) Insignificant Set pass 3) Refinement pass. For
each bit-plane, the significance level is given by S  2 b . In binary form, s has a
single bit set, at a bit position b , the test to determine whether the coefficient val[i] is
newly significant is d  Val[i]AND s . The coefficient is newly significant if and
only if its b th bit is set. If d is non zero, val[i] significant. Start with Insignificant
pixel pass, the new significant elements are identified and marked as the MNP. Then
move to next element. This can be described as if mark[i]  MIP then the
 S Anantha Padmanabhan and S Chandramathi 124

elements in the state array is marked as MNP i.e., output(d  S b [ val(i)]) and
mark[i]  MNP .Then start the Insignificant Set pass, the block significance can be
checked in the state table mark . If the block is significant means it is split up into 4
children. Then check the block significance of the children. If the grand descendent
block is significant we can further divide them into four. And check for the
significance once again. In the Refinement pass, set mark[i] MSP , and
i  i  2 2 cnt _ ms 2 . The same procedure followed by the encoder is also followed
by the decoder but with a few low level changes.

3.2. Motion Estimation based on Adaptive Rood Search with Spatio Temporal
Correlation (ARS-ST)

The block matching is performed in two stages. In the first stage or the initial search
stage, a new scheme is proposed is used for motion prediction, which chooses the
candidate-neighboring block on the basis of temporal and spatial motion correlation
between the blocks. After the initial search, the best matching block is found by
repeatedly employing a fixed-size rood pattern. The following sequential steps
summarize the ARS-ST [19] method. In our analysis, the MV measurements of the
previous blocks are used to predict the MV for the current block using a linear
M
~ 
predictor [17]. The predicted motion vector is computed as, mv   s i m n i , where
i 1
~  
mv is the expected current block motion m , m n i is the vector obtained by
block-matching in the raster scan order at the i th previous index and Si ,
i  1,2,, M are the linear predictor coefficients of order M. Where the motion

vector m , is the assumed real motion of the block obtained using the block-matching
algorithm.

Fig. 1: The current block and its corresponding neighboring blocks in both current frame and
reference frame

Temporal and spatial motion correlations between the blocks are used in our work for
choosing the best candidate MV which is described in Fig.1. In our proposed method,
the Mean Absolute Difference (MAD) between the Motion Vector of the two blocks
125 An Efficient Video Compression System

is selected as the motion correlation between them and this can be represented in the
following eqn.
       
 
D̂ab  M ax M bx   M ay M by  ; D̂  Max M dx    M ay Mdy  (1)
  ad  

Here D̂ ab is the MAD between the two blocks A and B Likewise the D̂ ad is
the MAD between the two blocks A and D . To reduce the computational
complexity, less number of candidate blocks is preferred for correlation comparison.
By testing various video sequences, among the four candidate blocks “B”, “C”, “D”,
and “E”, block “B” and “D” usually have more motion correlation with block “A”
than the other two blocks and are more possibly to be selected as the best candidate
neighboring blocks for MV prediction. The selection of best candidate block can be
represented as If  D̂   
 ab  ≤ D̂ ad 
is satisfied then assume
   
  T   T
 
M prc  MBx ,M By  otherwise assume M prc  M Dx ,M Dy  , where M Ax , M Ay ,
   
   
M Bx , M By , M Dx and M Dy are the horizontal and vertical components of the MVs
of blocks “a”, “b”, and “d”, respectively. Two stages, each stage adopting two search
patterns are used to perform the block-matching method.

Adaptive rood pattern initial search with predicted MV

In our analysis, a rood shaped pattern similar to the ARPS [16] is chosen for block
matching. In our work, the search pattern is made more flexible by adjusting the
horizontal and vertical arms individually, as follows,
   
  
R h  max M Bx , M Dx ; R v  max M By , M Dy  (2)
Here, Rh and Rv are the lengths of the two horizontal and two vertical arms,
respectively. Rh and Rv have the same value for the blocks of the first column, and
are determined from the MV components of their nearest top adjacent blocks
using, Rh . In our method, we have selected a small diamond search pattern (SDSP)
for the local search [18].In an unrestricted way, this fixed pattern is repetitively
employed. The center of the rood is fixed as the point with the least matching error
after each search, for the next search. The search is terminated; when the least error is
found at the center of the rood, and the MV is determined from the location pointed
by the least error point.

3.3 Video Encoder

The LSK algorithm is used to intra code the I-frame and after performing motion
estimation the residual is encoded for the P-frame. Once the motion estimation is
done using ARS-ST method, the P-frame is reconstructed using the motion vector
calculated and the reference frame. The reconstructed P-frame is known as the
Predicted P-frame. And the difference between the original P-frame and Predicted P-
frame is called as the residual. This residual is transmitted along with the motion
 S Anantha Padmanabhan and S Chandramathi 126

vector to produce good quality of predictive frames. The codec is tested at various
rates of compression of the P-frame and generally as the rate of encoding increases
the video quality also increases. In case of an I-frame the frame is intra coded using
the LSK algorithm and in case of a P-frame motion estimation is done and the
residual is encoded.

4 Results and Discussion

Our proposed Video Compression approach has been validated by experiments with a
variety of video sequences. The proposed system has been implemented in Matlab
(Matlab7.10). We report here some results obtained on a part of a video sequences
utilized for compression. Here we use Akiyo video for compression. The gradual
result obtained from the proposed system is given below. By employing this method,
the motion block in P-frame are identified. This can be represented in Fig.2.

Fig.2. The Sample output obtained from the motion estimation process in an akiyo video a) I-
frame b) P-frame c) estimated motion in P-frame.

Fig. 3 represents the decompressed frame for akiyo video. In this Figure, the proposed
method is compared with the existing video compression scheme Fractal compression
with Wavelet Sub trees (FCWS) [21].

Fig.3. The sample output obtained from the decompression process in an akiyo video a)
Original frame b) Decompressed frame by proposed method c) Decompressed frame by FCWS
video compression scheme

From this figure, we observe that the decompressed frame quality is better for
proposed method than the FCWS. To analyze the result of our proposed system, the
Compression Ratio (CR) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) parameters are used.
127 An Efficient Video Compression System

To evaluate the performance of the motion estimation technique in the proposed

system, the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) is used as a quality measure For
Akiyo video, the proposed system is compared with FCWS video compression
scheme [21]. This can be represented in the following Fig.4. In this figure, the
proposed system has high PSNR values when compared to the existing method.

Fig.4. PSNR comparison of proposed method vs FCWS method for Akiyo video

The PSNR for proposed method is 48.0293 but the PSNR for FCWS is 32.29. From
Fig. 4, we observe that the proposed method has higher PSNR ratio than the existing
video compression methods. The Compression Ratio (CR) for I frame is 1.7464 and
P-frame is 8.5467. Thus the proposed method effectively compresses the video with
better quality and high PSNR values when compared to the other methods.

5 Conclusions

In this paper, we have proposed a most promising video compression system using
the fast block matching technique and compression method. Here, we have depicted a
robust and efficient fast block matching technique based on adaptive rood pattern
search (ARS-ST). Also, spatial and temporal correlations were employed for selecting
the candidate-neighboring block for MV prediction. Only the residuals of motion
vector predictor were sent as side information for reconstruction. Therefore, our
proposed technique has better prediction as well as used very low side information.
Experimental results have proved that the frames that are reconstructed by adaptive
prediction are of high quality. Particularly, using the LSK technique, all decoded
images for each bit-rate that were recovered from a single fidelity embedded encoded
file, were truncated at desired bit rate.

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