Method and system for mixed-resolution low-complexity information coding and a corresponding method and system for decoding coded information
View Patent ↗Method and system embodiments of the present invention are directed to information compression by information-coding subsystems within computationally-constrained information sources, efficient information transmission through electronic communications media to information sinks with relatively large computational bandwidths. One embodiment of the present invention is directed to a method and system for low-complexity, mixed-resolution information coding by low-powered, computationally constrained distributed sensors which provide continuous video images through wireless communications to a computer-system information sink where the coded information is decoded.
1. A method for coding, by an electronic device, a sequence of information blocks generated by one of multiple synchronized information sources that include the electronic device, the method comprising:
performing an initial synchronization of the multiple synchronized information sources;
determining, by the electronic device, a high-resolution block interval of time;
for each information block generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources,
when the information block generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources occurs at the high-resolution block interval within the sequence of information blocks, encoding the information block generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources using a standard coding method,
generating, by the electronic device, a corresponding low-resolution information block from the information block generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources; and
when the corresponding low-resolution information block does not occur at the high-resolution block interval within the sequence of information blocks generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources,
coding, by the electronic device, the low-resolution information block using a standard coding method, and
coding, by the electronic device, a residual frame computed from the information block generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources and the low-resolution block using a Wyner-Ziv coding method, wherein high-resolution frames are produced at regular intervals of time specified by the high-resolution block interval with one or more low-resolution frames between each of the high-resolution frames.
2. The method of claim 1 wherein determining, by the electronic device, a high-resolution block interval further comprising selecting, by the electronic device, the high-resolution block interval so that, within each interval of time during which the multiple synchronized information sources generate a next information block, at least one of the multiple synchronized information sources encodes an information block using a standard coding method.
3. The method of claim 1 wherein coding, by the electronic device, a residual frame computed from the information block and the low-resolution block using a Wyner-Ziv coding method further comprises:
upsampling, by the electronic device, a reconstructed information block generated by the standard coding method to produce an upsampled frame; and
computing, by the electronic device, the residual frame from the upsampled frame and the information block.
4. The method of claim 1 wherein the information blocks are images captured by a camera-sensor.
5. The method of claim 1 wherein standard coding methods include non-Wyner-Ziv coding methods, including:
MPEG-1;
MPEG-2;
MPEG-4;
H.263: and
H.264.
6. A system that codes a sequence of information blocks generated by one of multiple synchronized information sources, the system comprising:
an information-block-generating component, wherein the information blocks are generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources;
an information-block-coding component that
determines a high-resolution block interval of time;
for each information block generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources,
when the information block generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources occurs at the high-resolution block interval within the sequence of information blocks, encodes the information block generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources using a standard coding method,
generates a corresponding low-resolution information block from the information block generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources; and
when the corresponding low-resolution information block does not occur at the high-resolution block interval within the sequence of information blocks generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources,
codes the low-resolution information block using a standard coding method, and
codes a residual frame computed from the information block generated by the one of multiple synchronized information sources and the low-resolution block using a Wyner-Ziv coding method, wherein high-resolution frames are produced at regular intervals of time specified by the high-resolution block interval with one or more low-resolution frames between each of the high-resolution frames.
7. The system of claim 6 , wherein the system includes a camera sensor and the information blocks are images captured by the camera sensor.
8. The method of claim 1 further comprising:
performing re-synchronizing operations such that the sequence of information blocks emitted by the multiple synchronized information sources are aligned with one another.
9. The method of claim 8 wherein the re-synchronizing operations occur periodically.
10. The system of claim 6 further comprising:
a synchronization mechanism to perform re-synchronizing operations such that video-frame sequences emitted by the multiple synchronized information sources are temporally aligned with one another.
11. The system of claim 10 wherein the re-synchronizing operations occur periodically.