Reducing quantising noise in p.c.m. coders

An analogue-feedback method has been developed to reduce quantising noise in p.c.m. systems. The improvement in signal/noise ratio, however, depends on the loop delay, saturation limit of the coder and the number of digits used. The overall characteristics of the feedback p.c.m. systems have been found to be better than those of the conventional p.c.m. for bit rates up to 50 × 103 bit/s.     

Optimised hybrid unidigit p.c.m. system

The coding efficiency of unidigit p.c.m. systems has been improved by using a secondary feedback loop, and the gain/frequency characteristic of the coder has been equalised. The overall signal/noise characteristic of this hybrid system is found to be better than those of all other unidigit systems; it is inferior to the conventional p.c.m. system only for bit rates higher than 60 × 103 bit/s.     

Hybrid p.c.m.?an experimental video system

Hybrid pulse-code modulation (h.p.c.m.) is a variant o. multilevel p.c.m., in which the least significant digit(s) is made to describe the quantising noise exactly. A theoretical and practical feasibility study has been made of the application of h.p.c.m. to the transmission of 625-line Pal colour signals over low-quality narrowband circuits.     

Optimum p.c.m. regenerator performance in presence of crosstalk

Minimum values of p.c.m. regenerator NEXT noise figure and FEXT noise figure are derived. The performance of regenerators with optimised cosine rolloff is within 0.2 dB of these minima, and that of commercial regenerators can be within 2 dB of the minima.     

Pitch synchronous 1st-order linear d.p.c.m. system

A system called p.s.f.o.l.d. is described which exploits the correlation between successive pitch periods of a speech signal. This system is a differential one and can employ various types of encoders. We describe a p.s.f.o.l.d. system using a 1st-order d.p.c.m. encoder and show that for a speech utterance this system has a peak signal/noise ratio which is 6 dB larger, and has an increase in dynamic range of 13 dB, compared with a 1st-order d.p.c.m. codec.     

High-performance c.c.d. channel filter for a p.c.m. codec

A monolithic c.c.d. filter for p.c.m. codec was fabricated employing both a minimum-phase design with a substantially reduced number of taps and almost perfect elimination of excess capacitances. Results, such as negligible degradation in frequency responses, considerable reduction of common-mode signal, low filter noise (?78 dBm) and wide dynamic range (84 dB) were successfully obtained.     

基于改进传感器模式噪声提取模型的源相机识别

针对当前基于传感器模式噪声(sensor pattern noise,SPN)提取模型处理压缩 视频来源检测的识别效果较差问题,提出一种基 于多尺度变换域自适应维纳滤波和一种加权最大似然估计的改进SPN提取模型。 首先干预视 频的编解码过程,在编解码器的环路滤波模块前提取视频帧,然后将视频帧输入双密度双树 复小波变换 自适应维纳滤波模型中提取噪声残差,最后使用加权最大似然估计从噪声残差中估计得到SPN。在公共视频源取证数据库VISION上进行测试比较,实验结果表明所提出的改进SPN提取 模型在ROC曲线和Kappa统计系数两种评价指标上的识别效果优于 传统SPN提取算法。     

Digital noise-shaping of residues in dual-quantization sigma-delta modulators

A new dual-quantization Sigma-Delta modulator is proposed in this paper where the coarse-quantizer output, obtained from the fine-quantizer output by means of a digital noise-shaping coder, is fed back to the input of the first integrator by means of a p-bit digital-to-analog converter (DAC) (typically, p=1). To avoid the truncation error inserted into the first integrator to propagate to the rest of integrators, the residue of the digital coder is first integrated and then fed to the second integrator through an additional multibit DAC. Unlike other dual-quantization architectures, the proposed one allows to obtain a large signal-to-noise plus distortion ratio by using aggressive noise transfer functions, like in conventional multibit modulators. Mismatch effects on performances are carefully analyzed. It will be shown that more than one digital coder can be included in the architecture in order to reduce the number of bits of the additional DAC. Simulation results are presented which support the theoretical analysis.     

MINLAB: minimum noise structure for ladder-based biorthogonalfilter banks

We introduce a minimum noise structure for ladder-based biorthogonal (MINLAB) filter bank. The minimum noise structure ensures that the quantization error has a unity noise gain, even though the filter bank is biorthogonal. The coder has a very low design and implementation cost. The perfect reconstruction property is structurally preserved. Optimal bit allocation and coding gain formulas are derived. We show that the coding gain of the optimal MINLAB coder is always greater than or equal to unity. For both AR(1) process and MA(1) process, the MINLAB coder with two taps has a higher coding gain than the optimal orthonormal coder with an infinite number of taps. In addition to its superior decorrelation ability, it has many other desired features that make it a potentially valuable and attractive alternative to the orthonormal coder, especially for a high-fidelity compression     

Hybrid waveform equalisation scheme for coaxial p.c.m. systems

The aim of waveform equalisation in digital transmission is to maximise the signal/noise ratio at the detection node. A simple scheme employing a conventional minimum-phase equalising amplifier to provide the main pulse shaping function and a transversal filter to reduce the remaining intersymbol interference is proposed for use in high-speed coaxial p.c.m. systems.     

Suboptimum quantiser/coder for a receiver with ternary integration

The letter discusses the optimisation of a 3-level quantiser/coder used for an incoherent receiver which detects a constant c.w. signal in narrowband Gaussian noise. Criteria of optimality utilised in this investigation are based on the efficacy, the divergence and Bhattacharyya distance.     

Techniques for improving the performance of CELP-type speech coders

Techniques for improving the performance of CELP (code excited linear prediction)-type speech coders while maintaining reasonable computational complexity are explored. A harmonic noise weighting function, which enhances the perceptual quality of the processed speech, is introduced. The combination of harmonic noise weighting and subsample pitch lag resolution significantly improves the coder performance for voiced speech. Strategies for reducing the speech coder's data rate, while maintaining speech quality, are presented. These include a method for efficient encoding of the long-term predictor lags, utilization of multiple gain vector quantizers, and a multimode definition of the speech coder frame. A 5.9-kb/s VSELP speech coder that incorporates these features is described. Complexity reduction techniques which allow the coder to be implemented using a single fixed-point DSP (digital signal processor) are discussed     

Streaming an image through the eye: The retina seen as a dithered scalable image coder

We propose the design of an original scalable image coder/decoder that is inspired from the mammalians retina. Our coder accounts for the time-dependent and also non-deterministic behavior of the actual retina. The present work brings two main contributions: As a first step, (i) we design a deterministic image coder mimicking most of the retinal processing stages and then (ii) we introduce a retinal noise in the coding process, that we model here as a dither signal, to gain interesting perceptual features. Regarding our first contribution, our main source of inspiration will be the biologically plausible model of the retina called Virtual Retina. The coder that we propose has two stages. The first stage is an image transform which is performed by the outer layers of the retina. Here we model it by filtering the image with a bank of difference of Gaussians with time-delays. The second stage is a time-dependent analog-to-digital conversion which is performed by the inner layers of the retina. The main novelty of this coder is to show that the time-dependent behavior of the retina cells could ensure, in an implicit way, scalability and bit allocation. Regarding our second contribution, we reconsider the inner layers of the retina. We emit a possible interpretation for the non-determinism observed by neurophysiologists in their output. For this sake, we model the retinal noise that occurs in these layers by a dither signal. The dithering process that we propose adds several interesting features to our image coder. The dither noise whitens the reconstruction error and decorrelates it from the input stimuli. Furthermore, integrating the dither noise in our coder allows a faster recognition of the fine details of the image during the decoding process. Our present paper goal is twofold. First, we aim at mimicking as closely as possible the retina for the design of a novel image coder while keeping encouraging performances. Second, we bring a new insight concerning the non-deterministic behavior of the retina.     

Some remarks on the stability and performance of the noise shaperor sigma-delta modulator

The stability constraints of the noise shaper are examined for the purpose of coder design. The author shows that the presence of a limiter in the noise shaper strongly influences the stability criteria on the loop filter of a third- or higher-order coder. A third-order coder was designed according to these results for high-fidelity audio. It performs with a dynamic range of over 100 dB, and the measured in-band noise agrees fairly well with the calculated value. The proposed design procedure also applies to the (sigma-) delta modulator, which is in essence the same device     

Lossy compression of noisy images

Noise degrades the performance of any image compression algorithm. This paper studies the effect of noise on lossy image compression. The effect of Gaussian, Poisson, and film-grain noise on compression is studied. To reduce the effect of the noise on compression, the distortion is measured with respect to the original image not to the input of the coder. Results of noisy source coding are then used to design the optimal coder. In the minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) sense, this is equivalent to an MMSE estimator followed by an MMSE coder. The coders for the Poisson noise and the film-grain noise cases are derived and their performance is studied. The effect of this preprocessing step is studied using standard coders, e.g., JPEG, also. As is demonstrated, higher quality is achieved at lower bit rates.     

Restoration of lossy compressed noisy images

Noise degrades the performance of any image compression algorithm. However, at very low bit rates, image coders effectively filter noise that may he present in the image, thus, enabling the coder to operate closer to the noise free case. Unfortunately, at these low bit rates the quality of the compressed image is reduced and very distinctive coding artifacts occur. This paper proposes a combined restoration of the compressed image from both the artifacts introduced by the coder along with the additive noise. The proposed approach is applied to images corrupted by data-dependent Poisson noise and to images corrupted by film-grain noise when compressed using a block transform-coder such as JPEG. This approach has proved to be effective in terms of visual quality and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) when tested on simulated and real images.     

Robust transform image coder over noisy channel

A robust quantiser design for image coding is presented. The proposed quantiser can be viewed as the combination of compound of a quantiser, a variable length code (VLC) coder, and a channel coder. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme has a graceful distortion behaviour within the designed noise range     

Variable bit rate adaptive predictive coder

An adaptive predictive coder providing almost toll quality at 16 kb/s and minimal degradation when the bit rate is lowered to 9.6 kb/s is described. The coder can operate at intermediate bit rates and can also change bit rate on a packet-by-packet basis. Variable bit rate operation is achieved through the use of switched quantization, thus eliminating the need for buffering of the output. A noise shaping filter provides flexible control of the output noise spectrum. The filter, in conjunction with an enhanced way to adapt the quantizer step size, which tries to accommodate the quantization noise feedback, accounts for the toll quality. By quantizing the residue with more than one quantizer, the effective number of bits per sample can be controlled in a deterministic way regardless of the entropy residue. The lower limit of operation is at 9.6 kb/s. Performance of the coder under random bit errors is also presented. It has been found that only at error rates of 10^-2 and higher does the degradation becomes objectionable     

Decreasing f.m. noise in absorption e.p.r. spectrometer

At high incident cavity power, the main noise source in e.p.r. spectrometers is microwave-source f.m. noise. In the letter, a simple and efficient method to decrease this noise is introduced.     

Video coding with fixed-length packetization for a tandem channel.

A robust scheme is presented for the efficient transmission of packet video over a tandem wireless Internet channel. This channel is assumed to have bit errors (due to noise and fading on the wireless portion of the channel) and packet erasures (due to congestion on the wired portion). First, we propose an algorithm to optimally switch between intracoding and intercoding for a video coder that operates on a packet-switched network with fixed-length packets. Different re-synchronization schemes are considered and compared. This optimal mode selection algorithm is integrated with an efficient channel encoder, a cyclic redundancy check outer coder concatenated with an inner rate-compatible punctured convolutional coder. The system performance is both analyzed and simulated. Last, the framework is extended to operate on a time-varying wireless Internet channel with feedback information from the receiver. Both instantaneous feedback and delayed feedback are evaluated, and an improved method of refined distortion estimation for encoding is presented and simulated for the case of delayed feedback.