15720571
An adaptive rate control algorithm for video coding over personal digital assistants (PDA)
With the recent development of third-generation communication technologies, encoding live video using a PDA and sharing it among friends has become a reality. However, the embedded processor inside a PDA is still not powerful enough and there are two major hurdles to overcome: (1) video coding needs to meet the rigorous constraint of the available computation capacity of a PDA; (2) In a PDA the computing power allocated to video coding may vary drastically (in bursts). In this paper, a new adaptive rate control algorithm is proposed for video coding over a PDA. This adaptive rate control scheme takes into account the time constraint of a PDA, and its bit allocation depends not only on the available data bits, but more importantly, on the available coding time. Experimental results show that, compared to the existing rate control scheme, the new algorithm can always achieve the maximum frame rate, maximize the utilization of the available bandwidth and computing power, increase the average PSNR, and improve the subjective perceptual quality of the reconstructed video.
981043
Learning Event Durations from Event Descriptions
We have constructed a corpus of news articles in which events are annotated for estimated bounds on their duration. Here we describe a method for measuring inter-annotator agreement for these event duration distributions. We then show that machine learning techniques applied to this data yield coarse-grained event duration information, considerably outperforming a baseline and approaching human performance.
8588212
Temporal Aggregates in OWL-Time
In this paper, we describe our approach for representing temporal aggregates in OWL-Time, and a systematic way of mapping iCalendar recurrence sets to OWL-Time temporal sequences. We present several examples of natural language expressions for temporal aggregates and how they would be represented in OWL-Time; some examples can be described in both iCalendar and OWL-Time, while others can only be represented in OWL-Time. We also illustrate how we can translate from a natural language sentence to our representation.
9260921
Complexity adaptive quantization for intra-frames in very low bit rate video coding
Conventional rate control schemes focus on the problem of finding an optimal quantization value for P- and B-frames. No rate control is available for the encoding of I-frames. This could pose big problems due to the large number of bits an I-frame could generate, and due to the fact that the number of bits varies drastically from sequence to sequence, depending on their image complexity. This problem becomes severe especially at very low bit rate. Therefore, a mechanism to allocate data bits to an I-frame according to its complexity is indispensable in order to have constant coding quality. This work presents a mechanism to establish for I-frames a generic relationship between the quantization value, data bits, and their image complexity. Experimental results show that this generic relationship provides a fairly accurate estimation of quantization value for an I-frame at given data bits and image complexity, and is very useful in controlling the data bits generated by an I-frame.
11110859
A locally-adaptive algorithm for measuring blocking artifacts in images and videos
Block transform coding is the most popular approach for image and video compression. The objective measurement of blocking artifacts plays an important role in the design, optimization, and assessment of image and video coding systems. This paper presents a new algorithm for measuring blocking artifacts in images and videos. It exhibits unique and useful features: 1) it examines the blocks individually so that it can measure the severity of blocking artifacts locally; 2) it is a one-pass algorithm in the sense that the image needs to be accessed only once; 3) it takes into account the blocking artifacts for high bit rate images and the flatness for the very low bit rate images; 4) the blocking artifacts measure is well-defined in the range of 0-10. Experiments on various still images and videos show that this blockiness measure is very efficient in terms of computational complexity and memory usage, and can produce consistent blocking artifacts measurement.
39269573
An adaptive edge-preserving artifacts removal filter for video post-processing
We propose an adaptive edge-preserving artifacts removal filter (EPARF) for post-processing video compressed using block-based motion compensation so as to improve visual quality. The proposed filter is based on half-quadratic regularization, and it can adaptively remove both blocking and ringing artifacts while preserving object edges. The proposed algorithm has been applied to video sequences compressed by the MSRA scalable video coding (SVC) codec with block-based motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF). Experimental results demonstrate that EPARF can significantly improve both subjective and objective quality.
29956562
Digital Video Coding - Techniques and Standards
A system for defeating erroneous correction in a digital signal reproducing apparatus. The system includes a reproducing circuit for reproducing a signal sequence in which information words and error correcting words are interleaved. A memory stores the reproduced digital signal sequence and produces a digital signal sequence made up of the information words and error correcting words, which are then de-interleaved and arranged in an original sequence. A correcting circuit corrects adjacent errors with respect to the digital signal sequence produced from the memory. A digital-to-analog converter converts a digital information signal obtained from the correcting circuit into an original analog information signal. The correcting circuit calculates partial syndromes according to predetermined equations and detects the number of erroneous words in one block which is made up of interleaved words. The error correcting operation is stopped when there are certain set of conditions which are related to the values of the partial syndromes and when the number of erroneous words are satisfied. The system continues to stop the correcting operation until other sets of conditions are satisfied, in order to correct errors of up to two words in each of the blocks made up of the de-interleaved words.
207290821
Discriminating between photorealistic computer graphics and natural images using fractal geometry
Rendering technology in computer graphics (CG) is now capable of producing highly photorealistic images, giving rise to the problem of how to identify CG images from natural images. Some methods were proposed to solve this problem. In this paper, we give a novel method from a new point of view of image perception. Although the photorealistic CG images are very similar to natural images, they are surrealistic and smoother than natural images, thus leading to the difference in perception. A part of features are derived from fractal dimension to capture the difference in color perception between CG images and natural images, and several generalized dimensions are used as the rest features to capture difference in coarseness. The effect of these features is verified by experiments. The average accuracy is over 91.2%.
24069960
Study of Improved Hierarchy Genetic Algorithm Based on Adaptive Niches
Canonical genetic algorithms have the defects of pre-maturity and stagnation when applied in optimizing problems. In order to avoid the shortcomings, an adaptive niche hierarchy genetic algorithm (ANHGA) is proposed. The algorithm is based on the adaptive mutation operator and crossover operator to adjust the crossover rate and probability of mutation of each individual, whose mutation values are decided using individual gradient. This approach is applied in Percy and Shubert function optimization. Comparisons of niche genetic algorithm (NGA), hierarchy genetic algorithm (HGA) and ANHGA have been done by establishing a simulation model and the results of mathematics model and actual industrial model show that ANHGA is feasible and efficient in the design of multi-extremum.
3409646
A survey of passive technology for digital image forensics
Over the past years, digital images have been widely used in the Internet and other applications. Whilst image processing techniques are developing at a rapid speed, tampering with digital images without leaving any obvious traces becomes easier and easier. This may give rise to some problems such as image authentication. A new passive technology for image forensics has evolved quickly during the last few years. Unlike the signature-based or watermark-based methods, the new technology does not need any signature generated or watermark embedded in advance. It assumes that different imaging devices or processing would introduce different inherent patterns into the output images. These underlying patterns are consistent in the original untampered images and would be altered after some kind of manipulations. Thus, they can be used as evidence for image source identification and alteration detection. In this paper, we will discuss this new forensics technology and give an overview of the prior literatures. Some concluding remarks are made about the state of the art and the challenges in this novel technology.
14988396
Exploring the energy-time tradeoff in high-performance computing
High-performance computing is and has always been performance oriented. However, a consequence of the push towards maximum performance is increased energy consumption, especially at supercomputing centers. Moreover, as peak performance is rarely attained, some of this energy consumption results in little or no performance gain. In addition, large energy consumption costs the government a significant amount of money and wastes natural resources. This paper investigates the tradeoff between energy and performance. Through the use of processors that support frequency and voltage scaling, we measured the performance and energy consumption of programs from three popular benchmark sets. We took multiple measurements for each program using different frequency and voltage settings. Results show that for many programs, a significant decrease in energy is possible with a small increase in time. We believe that this justifies further investigation into parallel HPC (e.g., MPI) applications.