Source and Channel Coding for Audiovisual Communication Systems

Topics in source and channel coding for audiovisual communication systems are studied. The goal of source coding is to represent a source with the lowest possible rate to achieve a particular distortion, or with the lowest possible distortion at a given rate. Channel coding adds redundancy to quantized source information to recover channel errors. This thesis consists of four topics. Firstly, based on high-rate theory, we propose Karhunen-Loéve transform (KLT)-based classified vector quantization (VQ) to efficiently utilize optimal VQ advantages over scalar quantization (SQ). Compared with code-excited linear predictive (CELP) speech coding, KLT-based classified VQ provides not only a higher SNR and perceptual quality, but also lower computational complexity. Further improvement is obtained by companding. Secondly, we compare various transmitter-based packet-loss recovery techniques from a rate-distortion viewpoint for real-time audiovisual communication systems over the Internet. We conclude that, in most circumstances, multiple description coding (MDC) is the best packet-loss recovery technique. If channel conditions are informed, channel-optimized MDC yields better performance. Compared with resolution-constrained quantization (RCQ), entropy-constrained quantization (ECQ) produces a smaller number of distortion outliers but is more sensitive to channel errors. We apply a generalized γ-th power distortion measure to design a new RCQ algorithm that has less distortion outliers and is more robust against source mismatch than conventional RCQ methods. Finally, designing quantizers to effectively remove irrelevancy as well as redundancy is considered. Taking into account the just noticeable difference (JND) of human perception, we design a new RCQ method that has improved performance in terms of mean distortion and distortion outliers. Based on high-rate theory, optimal centroid density and its corresponding mean distortion are also accurately predicted. The latter two quantization methods can be combined with practical source coding systems such as KLT-based classified VQ and with joint source-channel coding paradigms such as MDC