Retina-inspired video codec

In this paper, we aim to propose a video codec based on the novel retina-inspired filter and retina-inspired quantizer which both perform according to the early visual system. The recently released non-separable spatiotemporal OPL retina-inspired filter enables to progressively extract different kind of information from the input signal which is the sequence of pictures of a video stream. This retina inspired transform has been proven to be a redundant frame which ensures a perfect reconstruction when no quantization appears. The reduction of this redundancy is achieved by a quantization which is inspired by the spike generation mechanism of ganglion cells. This mechanism has been approximated by the Rank Order Coder (ROC) and the Leaky-Integrate and Fire (LIF) models. The ROC model encodes the rank of the spikes and it has been proposed as a complete and very efficient codec for still-images. However, its limitations concerning the reconstruction method forced us to focus our attention on LIF which encodes the spike delays. We approximate the LIF by a scalar quantizer with a dead-zone. This is the first attempt to build a complete retina-inspired video codec which gives promising reconstruction results at low bitrate and high reconstruction quality.