Motion estimation is an important component of video codecs and various applications in computer vision. Especially in video compression the compact representation of motion fields is crucial, as modern video codecs use them for inter frame prediction. In recent years compression methods relying on diffusion-based inpainting have been becoming an increasingly competitive alternative to classical transform-based codecs. They perform particularly well on piecewise smooth data, suggesting that motion fields can be efficiently represented by such approaches. However, they have so far not been used for the compression of motion data. Therefore, we assess the potential of flow field compression based on homogeneous diffusion with a specifically designed new framework: Our codec stores only a few representative flow vectors and reconstructs the flow field with edge-aware homogeneous diffusion inpainting. Additionally stored edge data thereby ensure the accurate representation of discontinuities in the flow field. Our experiments show that this approach can outperform state-of-the-art codecs such as JPEG2000 and BPG HEVC intra.
Our method is related to codecs for the compression of depth maps, as they also have a piecewise smooth structure. The approach of @cite_2 stores mask pixels on both sides of edges and uses homogeneous diffusion inpainting to reconstruct smooth regions in-between. A similar approach by @cite_12 for cartoon-like images also selects mask pixels along edges. @cite_5 extended this idea by explicitly storing segment boundaries with chain codes and selecting mask pixels on a hexagonal grid.
@cite_5 @cite_12 @cite_2
2155665474 2793519528 2043675455 2950217418
The efficient compression of depth maps is becoming more and more important. We present a novel codec specifically suited for this task. In the encoding step we segment the image and extract between-pixel contours. Subsequently we optimise the grey values at carefully selected mask points, including both hexagonal grid locations as well as freely chosen points. We use a chain code to store the contours. For the decoding we apply a segment-based homogeneous diffusion inpainting. The segmentation allows parallel processing of the individual segments. Experiments show that our compression algorithm outperforms comparable methods such as JPEG or JPEG2000, while being competitive with HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding). This paper proposes a lenslet image compression method scalable from low bitrates to fully lossless. The subaperture images are split into two sets: a set of reference views, encoded by a standard lossy or lossless compressor, and the set of dependent views, which are reconstructed by sparse prediction from the reference set using the geometrical information from the depth map. The set of reference views may contain all views and all views may also be dependent views, in which case the sparse predictive stage does not reconstruct from scratch the views, but it refines in a sequential order all views by combining in an optimal way the information about the same region existing in neighbor views. The encoder transmits to the decoder a segmented version of the scene depthmap, the encoded versions of the reference views, displacements for each region from the central view to each of the dependent views, and finally the sparse predictors for each region and each dependent view. The scheme can be configured to ensure random access to the dependent views, while the reference views are compressed in a backward compatible way, e.g., using JPEG 2000. The experimental results show performance better than that of the baseline standard compressor used, JPEG 2000. The multi-view plus depth video (MVD) format has recently been introduced for 3DTV and free-viewpoint video (FVV) scene rendering. Given one view (or several views) with its depth information, depth image-based rendering techniques have the ability to generate intermediate views. The MVD format however generates large volumes of data which need to be compressed for storage and transmission. This paper describes a new depth map encoding algorithm which aims at exploiting the intrinsic depth maps properties. Depth images indeed represent the scene surface and are characterized by areas of smoothly varying grey levels separated by sharp edges at the position of object boundaries. Preserving these characteristics is important to enable high quality view rendering at the receiver side. The proposed algorithm proceeds in three steps: the edges at object boundaries are first detected using a Sobel operator. The positions of the edges are encoded using the JBIG algorithm. The luminance values of the pixels along the edges are then encoded using an optimized path encoder. The decoder runs a fast diffusion-based inpainting algorithm which fills in the unknown pixels within the objects by starting from their boundaries. The performance of the algorithm is assessed against JPEG-2000 and HEVC, both in terms of PSNR of the depth maps versus rate as well as in terms of PSNR of the synthesized virtual views. In this paper, we propose a residual non-local attention network for high-quality image restoration. Without considering the uneven distribution of information in the corrupted images, previous methods are restricted by local convolutional operation and equal treatment of spatial- and channel-wise features. To address this issue, we design local and non-local attention blocks to extract features that capture the long-range dependencies between pixels and pay more attention to the challenging parts. Specifically, we design trunk branch and (non-)local mask branch in each (non-)local attention block. The trunk branch is used to extract hierarchical features. Local and non-local mask branches aim to adaptively rescale these hierarchical features with mixed attentions. The local mask branch concentrates on more local structures with convolutional operations, while non-local attention considers more about long-range dependencies in the whole feature map. Furthermore, we propose residual local and non-local attention learning to train the very deep network, which further enhance the representation ability of the network. Our proposed method can be generalized for various image restoration applications, such as image denoising, demosaicing, compression artifacts reduction, and super-resolution. Experiments demonstrate that our method obtains comparable or better results compared with recently leading methods quantitatively and visually.