MCL received a grant from Facebook recently for joint research on next generation video coding technologies. Through this support, MCL researchers will collaborate with Facebook researchers to conduct video coding research in the next 2 years.

With the development of camera and sensor technologies, high resolution images and videos have become ubiquitous in daily life. Demands on fast transmission and efficiency store high quality images and videos increases dramatically. Problem on how to transmit and store media data efficiently have been widely discussed. Online high-resolution video meeting and live broadcasting also raise the pressure on fast encoding and decoding under the limitation of current bandwidth.

Numerous codecs have been developed during past 20 years including the well know H.264, MPEG-4 and latest H.265/HEVC. They are widely used in our daily life. H26x and MPEG-x standards are well supported in both software and hardware. There are many encoder and decoder chip sets available commercially (for example chips from System on Chip Technologies Inc.) which can speed up the process and be configured based on user specifications. While for the royal free codecs like AV1, it has higher complexity and not widely supported by the hardware chips which hinder its being widely used.

Channel wise Saab transformation has been proved to have advantages in exploring the spatial correlation with small model size. MCL researchers will use a block hierarchy transformation based on the channel-wise Saab transform framework to achieve lower encoding and decoding complexity while preserve the rate-distortion performance.

— by Dr. C.-C. Jay Kuo