This post is not exclusively related to DSP but I have come across an interesting site that could be useful to anybody doing research. The site is citeulike and,  as the name says, is a site dedicated to managing bibliographical references. The idea of citeulike  is similar to other web 2.0 sites dedicated to managing bookmarks. In this case, it is possible to create groups based on a topic of interest which can then be used to organize a list of papers (each with its corresponding link to thedocument itself) that can be shared by a research group. Groups also have available discussion forums  and blogs that could be very helpful when organizing research within a group.The citations for each paper can be directly imported from many popular research sites, and they can later be exported to BibTex format.

Some time ago I wrote about how I was intending to use this blog to highlight research in DSP that is worth learning about so as to help starting constructive discussion about new DSP ideas or theories. I finally found the time to write about a paper I recently finished reading. The paper reference is:

B. Foo, Y. Andreopoulos and M. van der Schaar, “Analytical Rate-Distortion-Complexity Modeling of Wavelet-based Video Coder”, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 56, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2008, pp.: 797-815.

The paper can be found at ieeexplore or from one of the authors’ web pages at University College London

The title pretty much says it all what the paper is about. The paper presents an analytical model that accurately predicts the rate, distortion and decoding complexity of wavelet-based video coders. This main contribution is important because it is actually rare to find research presenting accurate analytical models of the rate, distortion or complexity in video codecs. Most of the works out there present some analysis but they invariably rely on exhaustive simulations to match some parameter or variable. This is not the case with this paper, which bases most of the analysis on deriving probabilities for the significance of blocks and coefficients with different quantization threshold. Also, the fact that the paper deals with the less common (at least for now) wavelet-based video coders is not really a problem because the analysis can be applied or extended in many cases to other types of video coders, which is another of the positives of this paper.
Read the rest of this entry »