Synthetic aperture radar image compression using tree-structured edge-directed orthogonal wavelet packet transform

Currently, wavelet-based coding algorithms are popular for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image compression, which is very important for reducing the cost of data storage and transmission in relatively slow channels. However, standard wavelet transform is limited by spatial isotropy of its basis functions that is not completely adapted to represent image entities like edges or textures, which means wavelet-based coding algorithms are suboptimal to image compression. In this paper, a novel tree-structured edge-directed orthogonal wavelet packet transform is proposed for SAR image compression. Inspired by the intrinsic geometric structure of images, the new transform improves the performance of standard wavelet by filtering along the regular direction first and then along the orthogonal direction with directional lifting structure. The cost function of best basis selection is designed by textural and directional information for tree-structured edge-directed orthogonal wavelet packet transform. The new transform including speckle reduction can be used to construct SAR image coder with the embedded block coding with optimal truncation for transform coefficients, and arithmetic coding for additional information. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms JPEG2000 and Fast wavelet packet (FWP), both visually and item of PSNR values.     

On chip novel video streaming system for bi-network multicasting protocols

In the past three decades, tremendous Ethernet-related research has been done, which has led to today's ubiquitous Ethernet technology. On the other hand, with the emergence of new network needs, a new protocol, the IEEE 1394 standard serial bus (or Firewire) was introduced. Firewire is suitable for high-quality audio/video applications which do not perform well in the best-effort-based Ethernet technology. However, since Firewire is a serial bus, it has harsh cable length limitations as compared to Ethernet capabilities.In this paper, we present a novel on-chip system that receives Firewire video and transmits it in multicast mode using Ethernet protocol. A major advantage of this novel system is to utilize the existing Ethernet infrastructure to extend the range of Firewire video streaming to reach remote nodes and make it even accessible to nodes with a single Ethernet interface. This will have tremendous impact on Firewire applications such as deploying Firewire cameras in big-scale security-sensitive buildings or industrial facilities with image-based remote quality control.This novel chip utilizes the concept of Ethernet multicasting transmission mode for video streaming. The proposed chip design converts the IEEE 1394 isochronous traffic to the Ethernet multicast frame format via two off-chip asynchronous write and read buffers.The goal of this research is to design an On Chip Novel Video Streaming System that avoids performance bottlenecks in the software protocol conversion of these two important network protocols. The author decided to study these two networks because of their broad use and cable power provisioning capabilities. The novel system design is implemented using a customized field programmable gate array (FPGA), which enables the integration of various system components on one chip. The designed prototype is studied using both network monitoring tools and analytical techniques, to verify its function and compare it with the existing approaches.Performance measures show that the On Chip Novel Video Streaming System consumes less than 21 mW of power for 100 Mbps and 82 mW of power for 1 Gbps, and utilizes 57% of a Xilinx Spartan 2-100E-6FT256 FPGA resources. Hence, it is possible to incorporate further extensions. Experimental results show that 88% of the network utilization can be achieved, due to the use of the customized, FPGA-based design of bi-network traffic conversion.     

On the Power Allocation and System Capacity of OFDM Systems Using Superimposed Training Schemes

Channel estimation in multipath environments is typically performed using the pilot-symbol-assisted modulation (PSAM) scheme. However, the traditional PSAM scheme requires the use of dedicated pilot subcarriers and therefore leads to a reduction in the bandwidth utilization. Accordingly, this paper investigates a channel-estimation approach for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems using a superimposed training (ST) scheme, in which the pilot symbols are superimposed onto the data streams prior to transmission. By using equally spaced pilot symbols of equal power and assuming that the number of pilots is larger than the channel order, it is shown that the channel-estimation performance is independent of the number of pilots used. The optimal ratio of the pilot symbol power to the total transmission power is analyzed to maximize the lower bound of the channel capacity. Overall, the current results show that the ST-based channel estimation schemes have a slightly poorer performance than the PSAM scheme but yield higher system capacity.