GOP-Interlaced Coding Scheme for Enhancing Coarse-Grain Parallelism and Error Concealment

Abstract

The main novelty of this work is redefining the structure of the group-of-picture (GOP). More specifically , in the current MPEG and H.263 video coding standards, the GOP is a group of consecutive frames and two GOPs have no overlaps in time. In our scheme, the GOP is a group of nonconsecutive frames and the frames in two GOPs interleave with each other. There are many advantages of using the proposed encoding scheme, which interlaces the group-of- picture (GOP). First, the encoding scheme is easily paralleled in coarse-grain. So far, no state-of-the –art microprocessors can provide enough computational power for most real-time video compression standards. In order to bring the real-time video compression into microprocessor-based consumer products, the algorithms and the architecture need to be redesigned. The proposed GOP-interlaced coding scheme enables a linear-speedup of two in a dual-CPU system for real-time video compression. Second, it offers improved error-concealment capability. Because compressed image data comes with a problem of sensitivity to channel errors, error-concealment techniques are introduced to minimize the impact of these errors. The proposed GOP-interlaced coding scheme leads to a 5dB SNR improvement in our motion-interpolated error concealment over the original coding scheme.