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»

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»

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»

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»

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»

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»

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»

Underwater images typically suffer from low visibility and severe colorcast due to scattering and absorption. In this letter, a novel method is proposed to handle the scattering and absorption problems of light with different wavelengths based on the color-line model. We filter out image patches that exhibit the characteristics of the color-line prior and recover the color line of the patches. The... View full abstract»

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a very popular supervised feature extraction method and has been extended to different variants. However, classical LDA has the following problems: 1) The obtained discriminant projection does not have good interpretability for features; 2) LDA is sensitive to noise; and 3) LDA is sensitive to the selection of number of projection directions. In this paper, a ... 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 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»

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»

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»

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»

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»

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»

The illegal distribution of a digital movie is a common and significant threat to the film industry. With the advent of high-speed broadband Internet access, a pirated copy of a digital video can now be easily distributed to a global audience. A possible means of limiting this type of digital theft is digital video watermarking whereby additional information, called a watermark, is embedded in the... View full abstract»

Posting images on social network platforms is happening everywhere and every single second. Thus, the communication channels offered by various social networks have a great potential for covert communication. However, images transmitted through such channels will usually be JPEG compressed, which fails most of the existing steganographic schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel image steganograp... 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»

Fractional-pixel motion compensation (MC) improves the efficiency of inter prediction and has been utilized extensively in video coding standards. The traditional methods of fractional-pixel MC usually follow the approach of interpolation, i.e., they adopt different kinds of filters, either fixed or adaptive, to interpolate fractional-pixel values from integer-pixel values in a reference picture. ... 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»

Estimating the disparity and normal direction of one pixel simultaneously, instead of only disparity, also known as 3D label methods, can achieve much higher subpixel accuracy in the stereo matching problem. However, it is extremely difficult to assign an appropriate 3D label to each pixel from the continuous label space R3 while maintaining global consistency because of the infinite parameter spa... View full abstract»

Depth estimation from single monocular images is a key component in scene understanding. Most existing algorithms formulate depth estimation as a regression problem due to the continuous property of depths. However, the depth value of input data can hardly be regressed exactly to the ground-truth value. In this paper, we propose to formulate depth estimation as a pixelwise classification task. Spe... View full abstract»

Different from all the previous reversible data hiding schemes, a completely novel one for the color image is proposed, which reversibly embeds messages into the color host image without modifying its corresponding gray version. The property of grayscale invariance is valuable, because many applications and image processing algorithms for color images are based on the corresponding gray versions, ... View full abstract»

This paper proposes a novel framework of reversible data hiding in encrypted JPEG bitstream. We first provide a JPEG encryption algorithm to encipher a JPEG image to a smaller size and keep the format compliant to JPEG decoders. After an image owner uploads the encrypted JPEG bitstreams to cloud storage, the server embeds additional messages into the ciphertext to construct a marked encrypted JPEG... View full abstract»

Reversible data embedding has drawn lots of interest recently. Being reversible, the original digital content can be completely restored. We present a novel reversible data-embedding method for digital images. We explore the redundancy in digital images to achieve very high embedding capacity, and keep the distortion low. 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»

Person re-identification (re-ID) has been a popular topic in computer vision and pattern recognition communities for a decade. Several important milestones such as metric-based and deeply-learned re-ID in recent years have promoted this topic. However, most of existing re-ID works are designed for closed-world scenarios rather than realistic open-world settings, which limits the practical applicat... 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»

In long-term object tracking, severe occlusion and deformation could happen to the targets. Due to the accumulation and propagation of estimation errors, even a few frames of full occlusion in a video sequence could lead to the failure of the tracking. Recently, correlation filter-based trackers have received lots of attention and gained great success in real-time tracking. However, most of them i... View full abstract»

Video classification is highly important and has widespread applications, such as video search and intelligent surveillance. Video naturally contains both static and motion information, which can be represented by frames and optical flow, respectively. Recently, researchers have generally adopted deep networks to capture the static and motion information separately, which has two main limitations.... 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»

Compared with conventional color images, light field images (LFIs) contain richer scene information, which allows a wide range of interesting applications. However, such additional information is obtained at the cost of generating substantially more data, which poses challenges to both data storage and transmission. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid framework for effective compression of LFIs... View full abstract»

The classical solution to an underdetermined system of linear equations mainly has two opposite directions, which lead to either a large ℓ2-norm sparse solution or a non-sparse minimum ℓ2-norm solution. In this paper, we systematically show that by modifying the well-known basic matching pursuit algorithm originally proposed to identify the sparse solution, an alternative sol... View full abstract»

Automated scene analysis has been a topic of great interest in computer vision and cognitive science. Recently, with the growth of crowd phenomena in the real world, crowded scene analysis has attracted much attention. However, the visual occlusions and ambiguities in crowded scenes, as well as the complex behaviors and scene semantics, make the analysis a challenging task. In the past few years, ... View full abstract»

We propose a new algorithm for the reliable detection and localization of video copy-move forgeries. Discovering well-crafted video copy-moves may be very difficult, especially when some uniform background is copied to occlude foreground objects. To reliably detect both additive and occlusive copy-moves, we use a dense-field approach, with invariant features that guarantee robustness to several po... View full abstract»

Recent successes in learning-based image classification, however, heavily rely on the large number of annotated training samples, which may require considerable human effort. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning (AL) framework, which is capable of building a competitive classifier with optimal feature representation via a limited amount of labeled training instances in an incremental ... View full abstract»

To address the hazy weather image degradation problem, we propose a single image dehazing method based on a physical model and the brightness components of the image by using a multi-scale retinex with color restoration algorithm. The overall dehazing process involves three components, including the atmospheric light value calculation, transmission map estimation, and recovery of the hazy image sc... View full abstract»

This paper describes transform coefficient coding in the draft international standard of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) specification and the driving motivations behind its design. Transform coefficient coding in HEVC encompasses the scanning patterns and coding methods for the last significant coefficient, significance map, coefficient levels, and sign data. Special attention is paid to the ... 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»

In this paper, we relate the operation of image dynamic range adjustment to the following two tasks: 1) for a high dynamic range (HDR) image, its dynamic range will be mapped to the available dynamic range of display devices and 2) for a low dynamic range (LDR) image, its distribution of intensity will be extended to adequately utilize the full dynamic range of display devices. The common goal of ... 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»

High efficiency video coding (HEVC), which is the newest video coding standard currently, achieves the best coding efficiency compared with all the other existing video coding standards. However, the computational complexity of the typical HEVC encoder dramatically increases because of the recursive searching scheme for finding the best coding unit (CU) partitions. In this paper, an adaptive fast ... View full abstract»

Ridge regression is widely used in multiple variable data analysis. However, in very high-dimensional cases such as image feature extraction and recognition, conventional ridge regression or its extensions have the small-class problem, that is, the number of the projections obtained by ridge regression is limited by the number of the classes. In this paper, we proposed a novel method called genera... View full abstract»

With the introduction of the H.264/AVC video coding standard, significant improvements have recently been demonstrated in video compression capability. The Joint Video Team of the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG has now also standardized a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of the H.264/AVC standard. SVC enables the transmission and decoding of partial bit streams to provide video services with... View full abstract»

A novel reversible data hiding algorithm, which can recover the original image without any distortion from the marked image after the hidden data have been extracted, is presented in this paper. This algorithm utilizes the zero or the minimum points of the histogram of an image and slightly modifies the pixel grayscale values to embed data into the image. It can embed more data than many of the ex... View full abstract»

Inspired by the recent advances of image super-resolution using convolutional neural network (CNN), we propose a CNN-based block up-sampling scheme for intra frame coding. A block can be down-sampled before being compressed by normal intra coding, and then up-sampled to its original resolution. Different from previous studies on down/up-sampling-based coding, the up-sampling methods in our scheme ... View full abstract»

This paper proposes an ultra-low complexity block-based lane detection and departure warning system. Based on the distribution of the lane markings in the region close to the vehicle, a parameterized region of interest (ROI) is determined. The lane markings in the ROI are enhanced by increasing the pixel intensity for detection in various environmental conditions. To reduce the computational burde... View full abstract»