Low bit-rate multimedia communication

摘要

With advances in computing, communication, and networking technologies, the digital multimedia is slowly becoming a part of our everyday life. Consumer devices such as digital camera and videophones, and services such as video streaming are common these days. This also puts pressure on the researchers to develop low cost solutions of multimedia communication without degrading the quality of the visual content. In this special issue, we focus on the low bit-rate multimedia communication with special emphasis on the real-time aspects. We present seven quality research papers in this special issue, which address critical issues, such as DSP Architectures, Streaming Algorithms, Error Recovery and Transcoding, in low bit-rate visual compression and communication. The first two papers consider real-time implementation issues in wavelet-based image and video coding. The next three papers have addressed issues related to real-time video streaming. The last two papers have considered techniques for efficient video transcoding. A brief introduction to these papers is presented below.