IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology

Two novel error concealment techniques are proposed for video transmission over noisy channels in this work. First, we present a spatial error concealment method to compensate a lost macroblock in intra-coded frames, in which no useful temporal information is available. Based on selective directional interpolation, our method can recover both smooth and edge areas efficiently. Second, we examine a... View full abstract»

A novel method for browsing and sharing a single and series of photographs is presented, which can be regarded as a system exploring a new medium type between photograph and video. The scheme exploits the rich content embedded in a single photograph, as well as in a photographic series. Based on studying the typical process of a viewer's attention to variations on objects or regions in an image, a... View full abstract»

Just-noticeable distortion (JND), which refers to the maximum distortion that the human visual system (HVS) cannot perceive, plays an important role in perceptual image and video processing. In comparison with JND estimation for images, estimation of the JND profile for video needs to take into account the temporal HVS properties in addition to the spatial properties. In this paper, we develop a s... View full abstract»

A novel framework for appearance-based photorealistic facial modeling, called Merging Face (M-Face), is presented and applied to generate emotional facial attributes in rotated views. Assuming that human faces belong to both the linear object class and the Lambertian object class, we span the face space and attribute space, respectively, by using groups of prototypes and merging ratio image (MRI).... View full abstract»

The block coder, which is a key module in the JPEG2000 image compression system, presents challenges for realization of a high-throughput, low-hardware-cost VLSI architecture. Though efficient architectures have been proposed for a block coder operating in specific modes, existing generic block coder architectures have low throughput versus hardware cost performance. In this paper, we present a lo... View full abstract»

This paper presents a fast binary motion estimation (BME) algorithm and its architecture for MPEG-4 shape encoding. The proposed algorithm explores the property of the binary-value in BME to quickly skip the unnecessary sum of absolute differences (SAD) computation. When comparing with the full search algorithm, simulation results show that it can efficiently save in the search positions to an ave... View full abstract»

For fast motion estimation, a gradient descent search is widely used due to its high efficiency. However, since it does not examine all possible candidates within a search area, it suffers from PSNR degradation for sequences having fast and/or random motions. To alleviate this problem, we propose a hybrid search scheme wherein a hierarchical search scheme is selectively combined with an existing g... View full abstract»

This paper presents a high-performance sum of absolute difference (SAD) architecture for motion estimation, which is the most time-consuming and compute-intensive part of video coding. The proposed architecture contains novel and efficient optimizations to overcome bottlenecks discovered in existing approaches. In addition, designed sophisticated control logic with multiple early termination mecha... View full abstract»

Chebyshev moments were recently proposed to address problems of moments of continuous orthogonal basis. They are moments of a discrete basis and are orthogonal in the domain of the image coordinate space, a feature which presents a number of advantages over moments of continuous orthogonal basis. No effort has been devoted yet to the efficiency of their calculation. In this paper, we present a har... View full abstract»

Scalable video coding is an ongoing standard, and the current working draft (WD) is an extension of H.264/AVC. In the WD, an exhaustive search technique is employed to select the best coding mode for each macroblock. This technique achieves the highest possible coding efficiency, but it results in extremely large encoding time which obstructs it from practical use. This paper proposes a fast mode ... View full abstract»

Human gait is an important biometric feature. It can be perceived from a great distance and has recently attracted greater attention in video-surveillance-related applications, such as closed-circuit television. We explore gait recognition based on a matrix representation in this paper. First, binary silhouettes over one gait cycle are averaged. As a result, each gait video sequence, containing a ... View full abstract»

Key-frame extraction and object segmentation are usually implemented independently and separately due to the fact that they are on different semantic levels and involve different features. In this work, we propose a joint key-frame extraction and object segmentation method by constructing a unified feature space for both processes, where key-frame extraction is formulated as a feature selection pr... View full abstract»