IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is currently being prepared as the newest video coding standard of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group. The main goal of the HEVC standardization effort is to enable significantly improved compression performance relative to existing standards-in the range of 50% bit-rate reduction for equal perceptual video quality.... View full abstract»

As one of the most popular image oversegmentations, superpixel has been commonly used as supporting regions for primitives to reduce computations in various computer vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel superpixel segmentation approach based on a distance function that is designed to balance among boundary adherence, intensity homogeneity, and compactness (COM) characteristics of the re... View full abstract»

Sports data analysis is becoming increasingly large scale, diversified, and shared, but difficulty persists in rapidly accessing the most crucial information. Previous surveys have focused on the methodologies of sports video analysis from the spatiotemporal viewpoint instead of a content-based viewpoint, and few of these studies have considered semantics. This paper develops a deeper interpretati... View full abstract»

A video compression framework based on spatio-temporal resolution adaptation (ViSTRA) is proposed, which dynamically resamples the input video spatially and temporally during encoding, based on a quantisation-resolution decision, and reconstructs the full resolution video at the decoder. Temporal upsampling is performed using frame repetition, whereas a convolutional neural network super-resolutio... View full abstract»

Nonlocal self-similarity of images has attracted considerable interest in the field of image processing and has led to several state-of-the-art image denoising algorithms, such as block matching and 3-D, principal component analysis with local pixel grouping, patch-based locally optimal wiener, and spatially adaptive iterative singular-value thresholding. In this paper, we propose a computationall... View full abstract»

Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) is the extraction of vehicle license plate information from an image or a sequence of images. The extracted information can be used with or without a database in many applications, such as electronic payment systems (toll payment, parking fee payment), and freeway and arterial monitoring systems for traffic surveillance. The ALPR uses either a color, blac... View full abstract»

Retrieving videos from large repositories using image queries is important for many applications, such as brand monitoring or content linking. We introduce a new retrieval architecture, in which the image query can be compared directly with database videos - significantly improving retrieval scalability compared with a baseline system that searches the database on a video frame level. Matching an ... View full abstract»

The state-of-the-art performance for object detection has been significantly improved over the past two years. Besides the introduction of powerful deep neural networks, such as GoogleNet and VGG, novel object detection frameworks, such as R-CNN and its successors, Fast R-CNN, and Faster R-CNN, play an essential role in improving the state of the art. Despite their effectiveness on still images, t... View full abstract»

Deep learning, e.g., convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has achieved great success in image processing and computer vision especially in high-level vision applications, such as recognition and understanding. However, it is rarely used to solve low-level vision problems such as image compression studied in this paper. Here, we move forward a step and propose a novel compression framework based o... View full abstract»

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard (ITU-T H.265 and ISO/IEC 23008-2) has been developed with the main goal of providing significantly improved video compression compared with its predecessors. In order to evaluate this goal, verification tests were conducted by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding of ITU-T SG 16 WP 3 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29. This paper presents the subjective... View full abstract»

This paper describes the in-loop deblocking filter used in the upcoming High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard to reduce visible artifacts at block boundaries. The deblocking filter performs detection of the artifacts at the coded block boundaries and attenuates them by applying a selected filter. Compared to the H.264/AVC deblocking filter, the HEVC deblocking filter has lower computational... View full abstract»

H.264/AVC is newest video coding standard of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group. The main goals of the H.264/AVC standardization effort have been enhanced compression performance and provision of a "network-friendly" video representation addressing "conversational" (video telephony) and "nonconversational" (storage, broadcast, or streaming) applicatio... View full abstract»

Recent studies have shown that a noticeable percentage of Web search traffic is about social events. While traditional Web sites can only show human-edited events, in this paper, we present a novel system to automatically detect events from search log data and generate storyboards where the events are arranged chronologically. We chose image search log as the resource for event mining, as search l... View full abstract»

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has recently been extended to support efficient representation of multiview video and depth-based 3D video formats. The multiview extension, MV-HEVC, allows efficient coding of multiple camera views and associated auxiliary pictures, and can be implemented by reusing single-layer decoders without changing the block-level processing modules since blo... View full abstract»

Emotion recognition is challenging due to the emotional gap between emotions and audio-visual features. Motivated by the powerful feature learning ability of deep neural networks, this paper proposes to bridge the emotional gap by using a hybrid deep model, which first produces audio-visual segment features with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and 3D-CNN, then fuses audio-visual segment featu... View full abstract»

Three-dimensional hand gesture recognition has attracted increasing research interests in computer vision, pattern recognition, and human-computer interaction. The emerging depth sensors greatly inspired various hand gesture recognition approaches and applications, which were severely limited in the 2D domain with conventional cameras. This paper presents a survey of some recent works on hand gest... View full abstract»

This letter presents an effective method to encode the spatiotemporal information of a skeleton sequence into color texture images, referred to as skeleton optical spectra, and employs convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) to learn the discriminative features for action recognition. Such spectrum representation makes it possible to use a standard ConvNet architecture to learn suitable “dynamic”... View full abstract»

The Range Extensions (RExt) of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard have recently been approved by both ITU-T and ISO/IEC. This set of extensions targets video coding applications in areas including content acquisition, postproduction, contribution, distribution, archiving, medical imaging, still imaging, and screen content. In addition to the functionality of HEVC Version 1, RExt prov... View full abstract»

A wide variety of systems requires reliable personal recognition schemes to either confirm or determine the identity of an individual requesting their services. The purpose of such schemes is to ensure that the rendered services are accessed only by a legitimate user and no one else. Examples of such applications include secure access to buildings, computer systems, laptops, cellular phones, and A... View full abstract»

Co-saliency detection, which focuses on extracting commonly salient objects in a group of relevant images, has been attracting research interest because of its broad applications. In practice, the relevant images in a group may have a wide range of variations, and the salient objects may also have large appearance changes. Such wide variations usually bring about large intra-co-salient objects (in... View full abstract»

The increasing proportion of video traffic in telecommunication networks puts an emphasis on efficient video compression technology. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the forthcoming video coding standard that provides substantial bit rate reductions compared to its predecessors. In the HEVC standardization process, technologies such as picture partitioning, reference picture management, and ... View full abstract»

Low-illumination images are usually taken in non-uniform environmental light, such as extremely dark or bright light or artificial light. The enhancement results achieved by existing techniques are prone to halo artifacts, color unnaturalness, and information loss. To address these problems, we present a physical lighting model that describes the degradation of poor illumination images, in which t... View full abstract»

Cross-scene regression tasks, such as congestion level detection and crowd counting, are useful but challenging. There are two main problems, which limit the performance of existing algorithms. The first one is that no appropriate congestion-related feature can reflect the real density in scenes. Though deep learning has been proved to be capable of extracting high level semantic representations, ... View full abstract»

This paper presents a blind dual watermarking mechanism for digital color images in which invisible robust watermarks are embedded for copyright protection and fragile watermarks are embedded for image authentication. For the purpose of copyright protection, the first watermark is embedded using the discrete wavelet transform in YCbCr color space, and it can be extracted blindly without access to ... View full abstract»

The compression capability of several generations of video coding standards is compared by means of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and subjective testing results. A unified approach is applied to the analysis of designs, including H.262/MPEG-2 Video, H.263, MPEG-4 Visual, H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The results of subjective tests for WVGA ... View full abstract»