Advanced Composite Structures Using a Dicyclopentadiene Based Polymer Resin System

Not Available In distributed command and control applications, video can provide significant help in terms of interpersonal communications, intelligence gathering, resource management, and other military functions. However, the available bandwidth is very limited in battlefield that necessitates the use of video compression. Current standards such as MPEG-1 (Motion Pictures Experts Group) can only achieve a compression ratio of 400, i.e. from 472 Mbps to 1.2 Mbps. There are I (Intracoded), P (Predictive), B (Bidirectional), and D (DC-coded) frames in MPEG-1. Although D-frames are not necessary for military application since they are mainly used for fast-forward function in VCRs. Thus one can eliminate D-frames to save some bandwidths. This is still not enough. The aim of this Phase 1 research is to develop a new technique that can achieve a compression ratio of 1000:1 so that it is feasible to use video in military command and control applications. Here Intelligent Automation Incorporated (IAI) and Boston University propose a new overlapping block transform based wavelet coder (OBTWC) to compress video images. The objective is to reduce the transmission time without sacrificing too much the performance of the image quality. Wavelet technology is a promising technique for image compression. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has adopted a Wavelet Scalar Quantization technique to compress all fingerprints in its headquarter in Washington DC. FBI's technique achieves compression ratio of 18:1. We have applied our proposed new technique to fingerprint image compression. Our approach can achieve 26:1 with the same quality as the FBI coder. Therefore, we strongly believe that our algorithm can achieve 1000:1 compression ratio if we replace the DCT coding scheme in MPEG-1 by our OBTWC scheme.