MASCOT - distributed Metadata for Advanced Scalable video COding Tools

The explosion of multimedia applications leads to a great expansion of video transmission over heterogeneous channels such as Internet, mobile nets and In-Home Digital Networks with new issues in terms of varying transport conditions (e.g., bandwidth, error rate) and receiver capabilities (CPU, display). In the future the Internet is expected to become the major carrier for all forms of audio-visual information and data. The requirements for bandwidth availability and quick and easy access to large multimedia databases will be more and more stringent. However new techniques are required to overcome the limitation of current coding techniques and to enable a quick and easy access to large multimedia data repositories. In this context, the main goal of MASCOT is to bring a breakthrough in video coding and access through the exploitation of two innovative techniques:

• New decompositions enabling scalable compression: The notion of scalability is the expected functionality to introduce a high degree of flexibility in the coding/decoding systems. For all currently available interactive multimedia applications however, which are very demanding in terms of video quality and coding efficiency, the cost as well as the limited performances of the scalability obtained in the current standards remain unacceptable. That is why an intrinsically scalable video coding scheme providing fully progressive bitstreams will be first designed in the framework of the MASCOT project by exploiting novel wavelet decomposition methods and more efficient prediction techniques. A major contribution of MASCOT will be the investigation of new nonlinear wavelets in the framework of scalable coding. Motion compensation is a basic ingredient of current video compression standards. This example of a prediction technique will be further developed and enriched to fit into a scalable coding framework and to reduce the coding redundancy involving other image transformation models like colour and illumination changes as well as transitions.

• Use of metadata information to improve coding: It can be expected that in the future, a very large amount of audio-visual documents will be indexed and that metadata information will be rather easy to create. As a result, in many circumstances, audio-visual material will be available together with the metadata describing its content. Therefore, future image and video sequence encoders will be able to use the metadata information in order to improve their efficiency or to optimise their strategy. One of the main objectives of this project is to demonstrate the validity of this approach and to develop an efficient compression scheme exploiting metadata information. 

Consortium:

• Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science
• Centre de Morphologie Mathematique
• Heinrich-Hertz-Institut
• Poznan University of Technology
• Philips Research Lab.
• Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Telecommunications
• Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
• Vrije Universiteit Brussel