FUVC: A Flexible Codec for Underwater Video Transmission

• Published in: IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing Vol. 62; pp. 1 - 11
• Main Authors: Zheng, Yannan, Luo, Jiawei, Chen, Weiling, Li, Zuoyong, Zhao, Tiesong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Bit rate; Channels; Codec; Decoding; Image coding; Image processing; Image reconstruction; Ocean exploration; smart oceans; Sound channels; Source code; Streams; Underwater acoustics; Underwater exploration; underwater image processing; Video codecs; Video coding; video compression; Video transmission
• ISSN: 0196-2892; 1558-0644
• DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2024.3374389

Smart oceanic exploration has greatly benefitted from AI-driven underwater image and video processing. However, the volume of underwater video content is subject to narrow-band and time-varying underwater acoustic channels. How to support high-utility video transmission at such a limited capacity is still an open issue. In this article, we propose a Flexible Underwater Video Codec (FUVC) with separate designs for targets-of-interest regions and backgrounds. The encoder locates all targets of interest, compresses their corresponding regions with x.265, and, if bandwidth allows, compresses the background with a lower bitrate. The decoder reconstructs both streams, identifies clean targets of interest, and fuses them with the background via a mask detection and background recovery (MDBR) network. When the background stream is unavailable, the decoder adapts all targets of interest to a virtual background via Poisson blending. Experimental results show that FUVC outperforms other codecs with a lower bitrate at the same quality. It also supports a flexible codec for underwater acoustic channels. The database and the source code are available at https://github.com/z21110008/FUVC .