Walt Husak

Economic and other considerations for Digital Cinema

The Motion picture industry began transitioning from celluloid-based distribution and projection to digital distribution and projection several years ago. The initial deployments have been considered experiments for movie distributors, theater owners and theater patrons. Digital Cinema offers an enhanced viewing experience for audiences, content flexibility for theater owners, and distribution cost savings for distributors. Digital Cinema also presents an opportunity to provide increased flexibility and increased security against movie piracy. Content distribution via electronic means to theaters is unlike any of the traditional applications for video compression. The transition from physical media to electronic media represents a paradigm shift in video compression techniques and applications that is being driven by economic reasons.

Orthogonal Muxing Frame Compatible Full Resolution technology for multi-resolution frame-compatible stereo coding

This paper describes the Orthogonal Muxing Frame Compatible Full Resolution (OM-FCFR) technology that provides efficient compression and reconstruction of full resolution stereoscopic video while maintaining compatibility with stereoscopic AVC Frame Compatible (FC) bitstreams. The OM-FCFR is a dual-layer coding system and is built upon the MVC Stereo High Profile of the AVC. Orthogonal muxing is used to design the enhancement layer video signal. A “Reference Process Unit (RPU)” is employed for creating the inter-layer reference picture that can serve as a good prediction for an enhancement layer picture. Simulation results show that significant improvement over the frame compatible solution is achieved in both subjective and objective evaluations. This technology was submitted as a proposal in response to the call for proposals (CfP) on MPEG Frame- Compatible (MFC) enhancement technology issued by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) and the specification was adopted as the working draft for the MFC standard and AVC Amendment 5.

Adaptive Reshaper for High Dynamic Range and Wide Color Gamut Video Compression

High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wider Color Gamut (WCG) content represents a greater range of luminance levels and a more complete reproduction of colors found in real-world scenes. The characteristics of HDR/WCG content are very different from the SDR content. It poses a challenge to the compression system which is originally designed for SDR content. Recently in MPEG/VCEG, two directions have been taken to improve compression performances for HDR/WCG video using HEVC Main10 codec. The first direction is to improve HDR-10 using encoder optimization. The second direction is to modify the video signal in pre/post processing to better fit compression system. The process therefore is out of coding loop and does not involve changes to the HEVC specification. Among many proposals in the second direction, reshaper is identified to be the key component. In this paper, a novel luma reshaper is presented which re-allocates the codewords to help codec improve subjective quality. In addition, encoder optimization can be performed jointly with reshaping. Experiments are conducted with ICtCp color difference signal. Simulation results show that if both joint optimization of reshaper and encoder are carried out, there is evidence that improvement over the HDR-10 anchor can be achieved.

Evaluation of ICtCp color space and an Adaptive Reshaper for HDR and WCG

New emerging technologies in the field of multimedia, such as high dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG), challenge the performance of existing image and video data processing algorithms, especially in terms of visual data compression and its faithful representation. HDR and WCG offer the technological capabilities to capture and represent a scene with an extended amount of details in both luminance and chrominance, respectively. This article presents and evaluates possible solutions to cope with such an extensive amount of data while delivering a faithful representation of visual information. More particularly, two approaches proposing novel color space, a constant intensity color difference signal representation called ICtCp and a novel compression optimization algorithm called the reshaper, are described and subjectively evaluated. The results of the conducted experiments show competitive performance of the two proposed approaches, ICtCp and reshaper, allowing a 10% bit rate reduction while preserving the perceived quality.

Stereographic Digital Cinema: Production and Exhibition Techniques in 2012

The growth in digital, stereographic motion pictures has been surprising and strong, providing a new revenue generator for the industry. After a sluggish start for the digital cinema industry, 3-D movies have become the primary driver of digital cinema adoption. Those experienced in digital stereographic techniques are clamoring for more tools and capabilities to support their creative visions. Meanwhile, the large industry of movie production workers is clamoring for information on the basic methods of creating and presenting stereographic movies. This paper presents the techniques and tradeoffs in employing 3-D camera capture, 3-D computer generated imagery, and 2-D-to-3-D conversion in developing stereographic images. It further reviews the current status and future possibilities for 3-D viewing systems in the exhibition cinemas.

Adaptive reshaping for next generation video codec

Various earlier work in MPEG/JCTVC have shown that out-loop reshaping, which modifies the video signal in preprocessing before encoding and post-processing after decoding in an end-to-end video compression workflow, can improve subjective quality of coded High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wider Color Gamut (WCG) content compressed using HEVC. However, the requirement of not making normative changes to the HEVC specification has significantly constrain the design and optimization of the reshaper. In April 2018, The Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) has launched a project to develop a new video coding standard to be known as Versatile Video Coding (VVC). This opens the door to exploit possibilities of the reshaper design inside of the core video codec. In this paper, an in-loop architect of reshaper is presented. Preliminary results suggest that the in-loop reshaping architect can retain the functionality of out-loop reshaper. In addition, the in-loop design can resolve many limitations of the out-loop design and can be used as a general coding tool for general video content not limited to HDR.

Practical operating points of multi-resolution frame compatible (MFC) stereo coding

3D content is gaining popularity and the production and delivery of 3D video is now an active working item among video compression experts, content providers and the CE industry. Frame compatible stereo coding was initially adopted for the first generation of 3DTV broadcasting services for its compatibility with existing 2D decoders. However, the frame compatible solution sacrifices half of the original video resolution. In 2012, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) issued the call for proposal (CfP) for solutions that improve the resolution of frame compatible stereo 3D video signal while maintaining the backward compatibility to legacy decoders. The standardization process of the multiresolution frame compatible (MFC) stereo coding was then started. In this paper, the solution – Orthogonal Muxing Frame Compatible Full Resolution (OM-FCFR) – as a response to the CfP is introduced. In addition, this paper provides some experimental results for broadcasters to guide them in selecting operating points for MFC. It is observed that for typical broadcast bitrates, more than 0.5dB PSNR improvement can be achieved by MFC over the frame compatible solution with only 15%~20% overhead.