Advanced Video Compression Capability

The objective of this proposal is to develop advanced video compression capability to reduce the bandwidth requirements in ship to shore video transmission. The volume of data received from the fleet via the AEGIS communication systems is enormous and creates an immediate need to reduce the data substantially or risk their corruption by exceeding channel capacity or risk their timeliness by slowing the transmission rate. Given the fixed and unchangeable signal-to-noise ratio of the channel, the obvious solution is to reduce the data rate and hence the signal bandwidth by compression of the source signal. High quality or lossless compression is a promising method for lowering the available bandwidth requirements. The Navy's stipulation is to reduce the source data size in every video data format by at least a factor of two (2) while maintaining sufficiently high quality in reception without harming its utility. The goal of this proposal is to develop software that will transcode (convert) any input video format, compressed or uncompressed, to a common standard compressed format that meets or exceeds the aforementioned requirements of data reduction (or bit rate) and reconstructed video quality.