PROGRESS: Completed Project	PROJECT REF: PA183
PROJECT TITLE: Efficient Rate Allocation for Block-Matching Motion Estimation
PROJECT DESCRIPTION: JPEG2000, a newly developed international standard for still image compression. It can provide superior objective and subjective image quality and can reduce file size by 40% compared with JPEG while retaining the same visual quality. Rate control or rate allocation is of great necessity to control the birate of image/video coding. A new and useful rate control scheme for JPEG2000 image coding, namely Successive Bit-plane Rate Allocation(SBRA), that can reduce the computation and memory requirement significantly, is highly suitable for real-time low-delay applications such as digital cameras. The proposed scheme uses only the currently available rate-distortion information to control the birate instead of using rate-distortion of whole image and can obtain an image quality close to the optimal truncation. Without the need of future rate-distortion slope information, the proposed casual scheme can be done in real-time with minimal delay such that part of the data can be sent out during the encoding process. This is very useful especially for the progressive transmission in JPEG2000 without long delay. JPEG2000 is the main application for the proposed fast rate control scheme. However, it can also be applied to any other multi-resolution image/video coding system. Potential Applications: - Digital cameras, digital camcorders, PDAs, multimedia-enabled cellular phones (2.5G, 3G and beyond), wireless LAN devices, bluetooth applications, webservers, internet applications, scanners, remote sensing, etc. Advantages over Present Technologies: 1. It can be done sequentially resulting in effectively zero delay. 2. Easy algorithm and thus low computation complexity with essentially zero memory requirement
FOCUS AREA(S): Consumer Electronics, Digital Entertainment
KEYWORDS: digital camera, digital camcorder, PDA, cellular phone, 2.5G, 3G. wireless, wireless LAN, bluetooth,
MODE OF COLLABORATION: Technology Licensing, Further R&D Collaboration
STATUS PATENT: Patent_Pending	PATENT NO: NA
ORGANIZATION: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology R and D Corporation Limited
CONTACT PERSON: Shirley Woo	EMAIL: cawoosw@ust.hk
TEL: (852)-23587918	FAX: (852)-23582751
WEBSITE: http://rdc.ust.hk	DATE: 03/01/2005