A DSP-based platform for wireless video compression

With the exponential growth of wireless voice markets, demand for wireless video services is soon to follow. However, bandwidth limited wireless channels coupled with mobility issues pose a great challenge in the hardware, software and algorithm design of communication systems. Raw video transmission is a high bandwidth application due to its spatial and temporal redundancies. Hence effective video communication over wireless channels calls for intelligent video coding and protection schemes. Also, the real-time nature of video necessitates high performance hardware and efficient software. This paper describes a modular and standards-independent DSP-based testbed (Paladin) designed for real-time video communication over low-bandwidth channels. In particular, we demonstrate the real-time transmission of MPEG-4 video and JPEG2000 still images over the Bluetooth wireless standard. Such a demonstration has many potential applications. We have designed the testbed to explore the possibilities, demands, and challenges of real-time wireless video transmission. We have implemented the MPEG-4 and JPEG2000 source coding on two DSP platforms: a Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320C6211, and a TI TMS3206416.