8060733
Embedded foveation image coding
The human visual system (HVS) is highly space-variant in sampling, coding, processing, and understanding. The spatial resolution of the HVS is highest around the point of fixation (foveation point) and decreases rapidly with increasing eccentricity. By taking advantage of this fact, it is possible to remove considerable high-frequency information redundancy from the peripheral regions and still reconstruct a perceptually good quality image. Great success has been obtained previously by a class of embedded wavelet image coding algorithms, such as the embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW) and the set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithms. Embedded wavelet coding not only provides very good compression performance, but also has the property that the bitstream can be truncated at any point and still be decoded to recreate a reasonably good quality image. In this paper, we propose an embedded foveation image coding (EFIC) algorithm, which orders the encoded bitstream to optimize foveated visual quality at arbitrary bit-rates. A foveation-based image quality metric, namely, foveated wavelet image quality index (FWQI), plays an important role in the EFIC system. We also developed a modified SPIHT algorithm to improve the coding efficiency. Experiments show that EFIC integrates foveation filtering with foveated image coding and demonstrates very good coding performance and scalability in terms of foveated image quality measurement.
18764674
Image information restoration based on long-range correlation
A new class of image information restoration algorithms, virtually different from traditional techniques, is proposed. In comparison with other approaches, our methods use not only the information in local areas, but also that in the remote regions of the image. The methods originate from the idea that there exists abundant long-range correlation within natural images and the human vision system, composed of our eyes and brains, can sufficiently utilize such types of information redundancy to implement the functions of image interpretation, representation, restoration, enhancement and error concealment. Our general approach can be summarized as five basic steps: fetching, searching, matching, competing and recovering. The experimental results on several practical applications show that our methods perform substantially better than many other state-of-the-art methods.
5874458
Quality-aware images
We propose the concept of quality-aware image , in which certain extracted features of the original (high-quality) image are embedded into the image data as invisible hidden messages. When a distorted version of such an image is received, users can decode the hidden messages and use them to provide an objective measure of the quality of the distorted image. To demonstrate the idea, we build a practical quality-aware image encoding, decoding and quality analysis system, which employs: 1) a novel reduced-reference image quality assessment algorithm based on a statistical model of natural images and 2) a previously developed quantization watermarking-based data hiding technique in the wavelet transform domain.
6449041
Adaptive frame prediction for foveation scalable video coding
Embedded rate scalable video coding allows for the extraction of coded visual information at continuously varying bit rates from a single compressed bitstream. This is a very attractive feature for many multimedia communication applications. Motion estimation (ME) /motion compensation (MC) techniques are widely employed in various video coding systems to reduce temporal information redundancy. One of the major challenging problems in ME/MC based rate scalable video coding is how to generate the prediction frame from the previous frame to match the current frame. This problem is more difficult in rate scalable coding than in fixed rate coding because the decoding data rate is unavailable to the encoder. We propose an adaptive frame prediction scheme for foveation scalable video coding (FSVC), which is a new video coding algorithm that combines a foveation-based human visual system (HVS) model with a wavelet-based rate scalable coding algorithm. The new frame prediction algorithm provides an adaptive mechanism to control the prediction errors while reduce error propagation.
15745002
Blind measurement of blocking artifacts in images
The objective measurement of blocking artifacts plays an important role in the design, optimization, and assessment of image and video coding systems. We propose a new approach that can blindly measure blocking artifacts in images without reference to the originals. The key idea is to model the blocky image as a non-blocky image interfered with a pure blocky signal. The task of the blocking effect measurement algorithm is then to detect and evaluate the power of the blocky signal. The proposed approach has the flexibility to integrate human visual system features such as the luminance and the texture masking effects.
17056192
Automatic Alignment of High-Resolution NMR Spectra Using a Bayesian Estimation Approach
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectral analysis has recently become one of the major means for the detection and recognition of metabolic changes of disease state, physiological alteration, and natural biological variation. For the pattern recognition tasks in which two or more NMR spectra need to be compared, it is critical to properly align the spectra for the subsequent pattern recognition analysis. Previous spectral alignment methods do not consider any baseline intensity variation between the spectra and disregard the effect of noise. Here we formulate the spectra alignment problem in a Bayesian statistical framework, which allows us to simultaneously and efficiently estimate the spectral shift and the baseline intensity variation in the existence of independent additive noise. Experimental results with real high-resolution NMR spectral data from human plasma demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach
32491059
Speech Driven MPEG-4 Based Face Animation via Neural Network
In this paper, some clustering and machine learning methods are combined together to learn the correspondence between speech acoustic and MPEG-4 based face animation parameters. The features of audio and image sequences can be extracted from the large recorded audio-visual database. The face animation parameter (FAP) sequences can be computed and then clustered to FAP patterns. An artificial neural network (ANN) was trained to map the linear predictive coefficients (LPC) and some prosodic features of an individual's natural speech to FAP patterns. The performance of our system shows that the proposed learning algorithm is suitable, which can greatly improve the realism of real time face animation during speech.
31361781
Adaptive Processing of Tree-Structure Image Representation
Much research on image analysis and processing has been carried out for the last few decades. However, it is still challenging to represent the image contents effectively and satisfactorily. In this paper, a segmentation-free tree-structure image representation is presented. In order to learn the structure representation, a back-propagation through structure (BPTS) algorithm is adopted. Experiments on plant image classification and retrieval refining using only six visual features were conducted on a plant image database and a natural scene image database, respectively. Encouraging results have been achieved.
26353125
On the better protection of short-frame turbo codes
Protecting short data frames by turbo coding is a challenging task because of the small interleaver size and the need for transmission efficiency. In this letter, turbo-decoding-metrics aided short cyclic redundancy check codes are applied to novel tailbiting encoded trellis codes with a twofold purpose: to stop the iterative decoding processes to achieve low-power design and to reduce fractional coding-rate loss. Significant coding gains can be achieved by actually increasing the transmission rate with a negligible increase in power consumption. Performance improvement is demonstrated over additive white Gaussian noise channels. The savings is up to 21.4% for the transmission throughput and 21.5% for the energy consumption of the turbo decoder when frame size 49 is used.
41489302
Integrated Optical Routing Topology for MicroPhotonic Switches
In this paper, an integrated optical beam router for MicroPhotonic switching is described. The router employs a piecewise linear optic that steers and couples optical collimated beams to optical fiber ports with minimum loss. Experimental results show that for a 3-port MicroPhotonic switch, fiber-to-fiber optical coupling loss less than 0.5 dB and insertion loss uniformity better than 0.25 dB can be achieved, and the tolerance to fluctuations in design parameters is practical.
153966
Compiling for the Impulse memory controller
The Impulse memory controller provides an interface for remapping irregular or sparse memory accesses into dense accesses in the cache memory. This capability significantly increases processor cache and system bus utilization, and previous work shows performance improvements from a factor of 1.2 to 5 with current technology models for hand-coded kernels in a cycle-level simulator. To attain widespread use of any specialized hardware feature requires automating its use in a compiler. We present compiler cost models using dependence and locality analysis that determine when to use Impulse to improve performance based on the reduction in misses, the additional cost for misses in Impulse, and the fixed cost for setting up a remapping. We implement the cost models and generate the appropriate Impulse system calls in the Scale compiler framework. Our results demonstrate that our cost models correctly choose when and when not to use Impulse. We also combine and compare Impulse with our implementation of loop permutation for improving locality. If loop permutation can achieve the same dense access pattern as Impulse, we prefer it, since it has no overheads, but we show that the combination can yield better performance.