Abstract
M.Ing.
There is a growing demand for HD video content. That demand requires significant bandwidth, even with sophisticated compression schemes. As the demand increases in popularity, the bandwidth requirement will become burdensome on networks. In an effort to satisfy the demand for HD, improved compression schemes need to be investigated together with increasing efficiency of transmission.
The purpose of this literature study is to investigate existing video compression schemes and techniques used in software implementations. Then to build on existing work within the mature field of video compression, in order to propose a new scheme which would then be tested for viability.
Two algorithms were proposed as a result of the literature study. The first algorithm is an improved way to add colour to luminance images of similar scene content. The second algorithm is an encoding scheme that is adaptive to the video content. The proposed encoding scheme adaptively selects to encode the next several frames using well established techniques or to use a technique proposed in this work. At the time of preparing this document, and from the available literature this second proposed algorithm is new.
An interesting compression tool has been developed during this study. This tool can be used to obtain a visual expectation of the achievable compression before applying the compression. The tool is a quadrant plot of the difference in image entropy between successive frames and an estimation of the mean percentage motion content between these frames. Over the duration of a scene, the spread of results reveals the extent of the potential compression gain.