CM0340/CMT502

CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
EXAMINATION PAPER

Academic Year: 2012/2013

Examination Period: Spring

Examination Paper Number: CM0340/CMT502

Examination Paper Title: Multimedia

Duration: 2 hours

Do not turn this page over until instructed to do so by the Senior Invigilator.

Structure of Examination Paper:

There are 4 pages.

There are 4 questions in total.
There are no appendices.
The maximum mark for the examination paper is 81 and the mark obtainable for a question
or part of a question is shown in brackets alongside the question.

Students to be provided with:

The following items of stationery are to be provided:

ONE answer book.

Instructions to Students:

Answer 3 questions.
The use of calculators is permitted in this examination.
The use of translation dictionaries between English or Welsh and a foreign language bearing
an appropriate departmental stamp is permitted in this examination.

1 PLEASE TURN OVER

CM0340/CMT502

Q1. (a) How does the human eye sense colour? What characteristics of the human visual
system can be exploited for the compression of colour images and video? [5]
(b) Different colour models are often used in different applications. What is the
CMYK colour model? Give an application in which this colour model is mostly
used and explain the reason. [3]
Given a colour represented in RGB colour space as R = 0.2, G = 0.6, B = 0.3,
what is its representation in the CMYK colour model? [2]
(c) What is a colour look-up table and how is it used to represent colour? [5]
Give an advantage and a disadvantage of this representation with respect to true
colour (24-bit) colour. [2]
How do you convert from 24-bit colour to an 8-bit colour look up table represen-
tation? [1]
(d) What is chroma subsampling? Why is chroma subsampling meaningful? What
is the benefit of doing chroma subsampling? [3]
For the following array of colour values, give chroma subsampling results with
4:2:2, 4:1:1 and 4:2:0 schemes. [6]
90 100 96 42
80 18 82 78
44 62 52 38
28 23 48 22

Q2. (a) GIF and JPEG are two commonly used image representations. Do they usually
use lossless or lossy compression? State the major compression algorithm (if
lossless) or the lossy steps of the algorithm (if lossy) for each representation. [4]
(b) Briefly describe the four basic types of data redundancy that data compression
algorithms can apply to audio, image and video signals. [8]
(c) Given the following string as input, /TAN/HAN/HAN/AN/, with the initial dic-
tionary below, encode the sequence with the LZW algorithm, showing the inter-
mediate steps. [10]

Index Entry
1 /
2 H
3 A
4 N
5 T

(d) Briefly describe the LZW decoding process, and illustrate your answer with the
above string sequence [5]

2
 CM0340/CMT502

Q3. (a) Briefly, with the aid of suitable diagrams, outline the JPEG/MPEG I-Frame
compression pipeline and list the constituent compression algorithms employed
at each stage in the pipeline. [9]
What are the key differences between the JPEG and MPEG I-Frame
compression pipelines? [4]
(b) Motion JPEG (or M-JPEG) is a video format that uses JPEG picture
compression for each frame of the video. Why is M-JPEG not widely used as a
video compression standard? [2]
Briefly state what additional approaches are used by MPEG video compression
algorithms to improve on M-JPEG. [2]
(c) What processes, outlined in (a), give rise to the lossy nature of JPEG/MPEG
video compression? [4]
(d) Given the following portion from a block (assumed to be 4x4 pixels to simplify
the problem) from an image after the Discrete Cosine Transform stage of the
compression pipeline has been applied:

118 42 54 150
42 32 30 34
100 60 43 98
44 39 40 31
i. What is the result of the quantisation step of the MPEG video compression
method assuming that a constant quantisation value of 32 is used? [3]
ii. What is the output of the following zig-zag step being applied to the resulting
quantised block? [3]

3 PLEASE TURN OVER

CM0340/CMT502

Q4. (a) In MPEG audio compression, what is

i. frequency masking? [2]
ii. temporal masking? [2]
Briefly describe the cause of each kind of masking in the human auditory system?
[6]
(b) Briefly describe, using a suitable diagram if necessary, the MPEG-1 audio
compression algorithm, outlining how frequency masking and temporal masking
are encoded. [10]
(c) In MPEG-4 Audio an alternative synthesis-based approach may be adopted to
achieve compression. Briefly discuss how the following may be compressed with
MPEG-4 Audio:
• Musical Audio Signals
• Spoken Word Audio.
What are advantages and disadvantages of such approaches? [4]
(d) Assume that after analysis, the critical band filters of MPEG-1 Audio have output
the levels of 3 consecutive critical bands as:
Band 1 2 3
Level (dB) 20 90 55

Assuming that signal-to-mask ratios for bands 1, 2 and 3 are for signals above
80 dB in band 2 a masking of 30 dB in band 1 and 40 dB in band 3:
Show how frequency masking is implemented in MPEG audio compression.
What is the saving in bits to transmit the masked value in each masked band?
[3]

4X END OF EXAMINATION