23466581
Object watermarks for digital images and video
Abstract The growth of new image technologies has created a need for techniques that can be used for copyright protection of digital images and video. One approach for copyright protection is to introduce an invisible signal, known as a digital watermark, into an image or video sequence. With the development of MPEG-4, frame-based approach has been migrating to object-based approach. Therefore, object-based watermarking schemes are needed. In this article, we propose a novel blind object watermarking scheme for images and video using shape adaptive-discrete wavelet transform (SA-DWT). To make the watermark robust and perceptual invisible, we embed it in the weighting mean of the wavelet blocks using the quantisation visual model based on the human visual system. Watermark detection is accomplished without the original, unwatermarked object by using statistical detection technique. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme is perceptual invisible and robust against many attacks such as lossy image/video compression (e.g. JPEG, JPEG2000 and MPEG-4), scaling, adding noise, filtering, D/A and A/D conversion, etc.
28754515
3D Object-based Scalable Wavelet Video Coding with Boundary Effect Suppression
This paper extends the lifting-based motion threading technique from the frame-based coding to the object-based coding, attracted by the unique advantages of the object-based coding that do not exist in other coding schemes. The boundary effects, which exist in spatial and temporal wavelet transforms due to the manner of object-based coding, are well suppressed by 3D shape adaptive discrete wavelet transform (3D SA-DWT) via the lifting implementation in a unified framework. Based on the proposed object-based motion threading technique, a 3D object-based scalable wavelet video coder is developed. Experimental results show that the proposed coder achieves good performance compared with the existing object-based coders, and provides the scalability functionality at the same time.
6024658
Discovering Texture Regularity as a Higher-Order Correspondence Problem
Understanding texture regularity in real images is a challenging computer vision task. We propose a higher-order feature matching algorithm to discover the lattices of near-regular textures in real images. The underlying lattice of a near-regular texture identifies all of the texels as well as the global topology among the texels. A key contribution of this paper is to formulate lattice-finding as a correspondence problem. The algorithm finds a plausible lattice by iteratively proposing texels and assigning neighbors between the texels. Our matching algorithm seeks assignments that maximize both pair-wise visual similarity and higher-order geometric consistency. We approximate the optimal assignment using a recently developed spectral method. We successfully discover the lattices of a diverse set of unsegmented, real-world textures with significant geometric warping and large appearance variation among texels.
13208870
An Evolutionary Approach to Adaptive Model-Building
Learning an input-output mapping from a set of examples can be regarded as a problem of model-building. From this point of view, by a hierarchical representation scheme for models, an evolutionary computational approach to model-building problems is proposed in this paper, which is based on the ideas from the evolution programs and the genetic programmings. The computer experiments indicate that it is surprisingly effective in searching the optimal model for model-building problems.
7923791
Discontinuity-Based Simplification of Free Form Surface From a Range Image
This paper improves an existing method for more accurate simplification of free form surface represented as dense points. The main improvement lies in two aspects: one is the introduction of a novel transformation of curvatures, the other is to propose sampling points using both curvature information and curvature variation information. The experimental results based on real images show that the original object surface has been better approximated and the majority of the surface discontinuities have been better preserved with considerably few sampled (5%) data points
20456243
Energy-Efficient Cooperative Image Processing in Video Sensor Networks
Different from conventional sensor networks, video sensor networks are distinctly characterized by their immense information and directional sensing models. In this paper, we propose an innovative, systematic method for image processing in video sensor networks in order to reduce the workload for individual sensors. Given the severe resource constraints on individual sensor nodes, our approach is to employ the redundancy among sensor nodes by partitioning the sensing task among highly correlated sensors. For an object of interest, each sensor only needs to capture and deliver a fraction of the scene of interests and these partial images can be fused at the sink to reconstruct a composite image. In particular, we detail how the sensing task can be partitioned among the sensors and propose an image fusion algorithms based on epipolar line constraint to fuse the received partial images at the sink. The experimental results show that our approach can achieve satisfactory results and we give detailed discussions on the effects of different system parameters.
10184967
Tree-to-String Alignment Template for Statistical Machine Translation
We present a novel translation model based on tree-to-string alignment template (TAT) which describes the alignment between a source parse tree and a target string. A TAT is capable of generating both terminals and non-terminals and performing reordering at both low and high levels. The model is linguistically syntax-based because TATs are extracted automatically from word-aligned, source side parsed parallel texts. To translate a source sentence, we first employ a parser to produce a source parse tree and then apply TATs to transform the tree into a target string. Our experiments show that the TAT-based model significantly outperforms Pharaoh, a state-of-the-art decoder for phrase-based models.