32197027
A hardware accelerator for video segmentation using programmable morphology PE array
Video segmentation is a key operation for MPEG-4 and MPEG-7. It is a computationally intensive task and cannot be afforded by general microprocessors. In this paper, we propose a hardware accelerator for video segmentation. Since most of the core operations of video segmentation algorithms can be mapped to morphological operations, the core of this accelerator is a programmable morphology PE array. With the programmable ability of each PE and the interconnection between them, this accelerator can achieve both high throughput and high flexibility. Simulation shows the proposed hardware accelerator can speed up the most important video segmentation algorithms 20 times to achieve realtime performance and has high programmability with a little hardware cost overhead.
16730298
Efficient moving object segmentation algorithm using background registration technique
An efficient moving object segmentation algorithm suitable for real-time content-based multimedia communication systems is proposed in this paper. First, a background registration technique is used to construct a reliable background image from the accumulated frame difference information. The moving object region is then separated from the background region by comparing the current frame with the constructed background image. Finally, a post-processing step is applied on the obtained object mask to remove noise regions and to smooth the object boundary. In situations where object shadows appear in the background region, a pre-processing gradient filter is applied on the input image to reduce the shadow effect. In order to meet the real-time requirement, no computationally intensive operation is included in this method. Moreover, the implementation is optimized using parallel processing and a processing speed of 25 QCIF fps can be achieved on a personal computer with a 450-MHz Pentium III processor. Good segmentation performance is demonstrated by the simulation results.
17373350
VLSI architecture design of MPEG-4 shape coding
This paper presents an efficient VLSI architecture design of MPEG-4 shape coding, which is the key technology for supporting the content-based functionality of the MPEG-4 video standard. The real-time constraint of MPEG-4 shape coding leads to a heavy computational bottleneck on today's computer architectures. To overcome this problem, design analysis and optimization of MPEG-4 shape coding are addressed. By utilizing the RISC-based model, computational behaviors of the MPEG-4 shape coding tool are carefully examined and analyzed. The characteristic of a large amount of bit-level data processing and data transfer of MPEG-4 shape coding motivates the optimization of bit-level data operations. Applying data-flow optimization and data reuse techniques, bit-level computation-efficient architectures, such as data-dispatch-based binary-shaped motion estimation, the delay-line model, and configurable context-based arithmetic coding, are designed to accelerate bit-level processing. These hardware blocks are integrated and scheduled in a very efficient data flow to achieve real-time performance for MPEG-4 CPL2 (core profile level 2) specification at 23.5 MHz clock rate. The system architecture is implemented using Verilog HDL and synthesized with a 0.35 /spl mu/m four-layer CMOS standard library.
14850996
Effects of network characteristics on task performance in a desktop CVE system
The influences of network characteristics on the task performance in a desktop collaborative virtual environment (CVE) system were studied. In the experiment, two participants worked together to accomplish a collaborative task and a network emulator was utilized to simulate real network characteristics. The task used in the experiment was designed to be highly interactive and had rigid requirements on network characteristics (e.g. latency and packet loss). The objective performance and subjective assessment were recorded and analyzed quantitatively as a function of network latency and packet loss rate. The experiment results show that network latency has no distinct effect on task performance when network latency is less than 200 ms and lightly affect task performance when network latency is between 200 and 600 ms; packet loss has no effect on task performance when there are 40 state update messages received per second and lightly affect task performance when there are between 15 and 40 state update messages received per second.
13928372
VRules: an effective association-based classifier for videos
Video classification is an important step towards multimedia understanding. Most state-of-the-art approaches which apply HMM to capture the temporal information of videos have the limitation by assuming that the current state of a video depends only on the immediate previous state. Nevertheless, this assumption may not hold for videos of various categories. In this paper, we present an effective video classifier which employs the association rule mining technique to discover the actual dependence relationship between video states. The discriminatory state transition patterns mined from different video categories are then used to perform classification. Besides capturing the association between states in the time space, we also capture the association between low-level features in spatial dimension to further distinguish the semantics of videos. Experimental results show that the performance of our association rule based classifier is quite promising.
206952974
High throughput CORDIC-based systolic array design for the discrete cosine transform
In this paper, we propose a modified Malvar algorithm that can transfer the Discrete Hartley Transform (DHT) results to the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) by using a one additional CORDIC computing stage. A fast CORDIC-based systolic array is designed with four attractive features the single/double data folding feature; the constructive feature; the co-computing feature; and redundant path computation. Due to the existence of the redundant path, the proposed design also has the capability of error detection.<<ETX>>
11658624
Statistical Feature Selection for Mandarin Speech Emotion Recognition
Performance of speech emotion recognition largely depends on the acoustic features used in a classifier. This paper studies the statistical feature selection problem in Mandarin speech emotion recognition. This study was based on a speaker dependent emotional mandarin database. Pitch, energy, duration, formant related features and some velocity information were selected as base features. Some statistics of them consisted of original feature set and full stepwise discriminant analysis (SDA) was employed to select extracted features. The results of feature selection were evaluated through a LDA based classifier. Experiment results indicate that pitch, log energy, speed and 1st formant are the most important factors and the accuracy rate increases from 63.1 % to 76.5 % after feature selection. Meanwhile, the features selected by SDA are better than the results of other feature selection methods in a LDA based classifier and SVM. The best performance is achieved when the feature number is in the range of 9 to 12.
3172403
On overlay schemes to support point-in-range queries for scalable grid resource discovery
A resource directory is a critical component of a grid architecture. P2P computing paradigm could address some of the scalability issues that make distributed resource discovery services challenging. Unfortunately, most existing distributed hash table (DHT) based P2P overlays have difficulty in treating attribute range queries that are common in resource discovery lookups. This paper proposes a general framework for range-based resource discovery. In particular, the proposed framework maps tree-structured logical data (i.e., range indexing) onto a DHT-based physical node space (i.e., resource brokers). In this paper, we consider three mapping schemes from the logical space onto the physical space. Each mapping scheme uses a different replication mechanism to reduce range search time and to achieve load balance. We analytically and experimentally compare the performance characteristics (query/update costs and workload distributions) of these schemes and discuss their applicability under different resource discovery service scenarios.