PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | May 10, 2007
Proc. SPIE. 6590, VLSI Circuits and Systems III
KEYWORDS: Principal component analysis, Super resolution, Image segmentation, Image processing, Video, Receivers, Image quality, Volume rendering, System on a chip, Lawrencium
This paper presents a system for real-time video reception in low-power mobile devices using Digital Audio Broadcast
(DAB) technology for transmission. A demo receiver terminal is designed into a FPGA platform using the Advanced
Simple Profile (ASP) MPEG-4 standard for video decoding. In order to keep the demanding DAB requirements, the
bandwidth of the encoded sequence must be drastically reduced. In this sense, prior to the MPEG-4 coding stage, a pre-processing
stage is performed. It is firstly composed by a segmentation phase according to motion and texture based on
the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the input video sequence, and secondly by a down-sampling phase, which
depends on the segmentation results. As a result of the segmentation task, a set of texture and motion maps are obtained.
These motion and texture maps are also included into the bit-stream as user data side-information and are therefore
known to the receiver. For all bit-rates, the whole encoder/decoder system proposed in this paper exhibits higher image
visual quality than the alternative encoding/decoding method, assuming equal image sizes. A complete analysis of both
techniques has also been performed to provide the optimum motion and texture maps for the global system, which has
been finally validated for a variety of video sequences. Additionally, an optimal HW/SW partition for the MPEG-4
decoder has been studied and implemented over a Programmable Logic Device with an embedded ARM9 processor.
Simulation results show that a throughput of 15 QCIF frames per second can be achieved with low area and low power
implementation.
