| Summary: | The rapidly expanding field of multimedia communications has fueled significant
research and development work in the area of real-time video encoding.
Dedicated hardware solutions have reached maturity and cost-efficient
hardware encoders are being developed by several manufacturers. However,
software solutions based on general purpose processors or programmable digital
signal processors (DSPs) have significant merits. Towards this objective,
we have developed a flexible framework for video encoding that yields very
good computation-performance tradeoffs. The proposed framework consists
of a set of optimized core components: motion estimation, the Discrete Cosine
Transform (DCT), quantization, and mode selection. Each of the components
can be configured to achieve a desired computation-performance tradeoff. The
components can be assembled to obtain encoders with varying degrees of computational
complexity. Computation control has been implemented within the
proposed framework to allow the resulting algorithms to adapt to the available
computational resources. The proposed framework was applied to MPEG-2
and H.263 encoding using Intel's Pentium/MMX desktop processor. Excellent
speed-performance tradeoffs were obtained. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of === Graduate
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