IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology

This paper addresses the problem of distortion modeling for video transmission over burst-loss channels characterized by a finite-state Markov chain. Based on a detailed analysis of the error propagation and the bursty losses, a distortion trellis model is proposed, enabling us to estimate at the both the frame level and sequence level the expected mean-square error (MSE) distortion caused by Mark... View full abstract»

De-interlacing algorithms are used to convert interlaced video into progressive scanning format. The motion-adaptive technique provides acceptable picture quality, but the quality of the motion area still needs to be improved. Among the various de-interlacing techniques, the motion-compensated de-interlacing technique provides the best performance if the estimated motion information is reliable. H... View full abstract»

Video stabilization is an important technique in digital cameras. Its impact increases rapidly with the rising popularity of handheld cameras and cameras mounted on moving platforms (e.g., cars). Stabilization of two images can be viewed as an image registration problem. However, to ensure the visual quality of the whole video, video stabilization has a particular emphasis on the accuracy and robu... View full abstract»

In this paper, we develop a new video-to-video face recognition algorithm. The major advantage of the video-based method is that more information is available in a video sequence than in a single image. In order to take advantage of the large amount of information in the video sequence and at the same time overcome the processing speed and data size problems, we develop several new techniques incl... View full abstract»

This paper presents the generalized butterfly graph (GBG) and its application to video stream authentication. Compared with the original butterfly graph, the proposed GBG provides significantly increased flexibility, which is necessary for streaming applications, including supporting arbitrary bit-rate budget for authentication and arbitrary number of video packets. Within the GBG design, the prob... View full abstract»

This paper constructs a class of generalized embeddings of multiplicative watermarks. Ordinary multiplicative and additive methods are included as special cases. The new watermarks automatically adapt to the local contents of host signals, benefiting the perceptual quality. The decoding makes use of the optimal generalized correlation detector. The host interference is precanceled at the embedder ... View full abstract»

This paper presents a reversible or lossless watermarking algorithm for images without using a location map in most cases. This algorithm employs prediction errors to embed data into an image. A sorting technique is used to record the prediction errors based on magnitude of its local variance. Using sorted prediction errors and, if needed, though rarely, a reduced size location map allows us to em... View full abstract»

Video decoding complexity modeling and prediction is an increasingly important issue for efficient resource utilization in a variety of applications, including task scheduling, receiver-driven complexity shaping, and adaptive dynamic voltage scaling. In this paper we present a novel view of this problem based on a statistical framework perspective. We explore the statistical structure (clustering)... View full abstract»

With decreasing costs of high-quality surveillance systems, human activity detection and tracking has become increasingly practical. Accordingly, automated systems have been designed for numerous detection tasks, but the task of detecting illegally parked vehicles has been left largely to the human operators of surveillance systems. We propose a methodology for detecting this event in real time by... View full abstract»

Region-of-interest (ROI) determination is very important for video processing and it is desirable to find a simple method to identify the ROI. Along this direction, this paper investigates a user attention model based on visual rhythm analysis for automatic determination of ROI in a video. The visual rhythm, which is an abstraction of a video, is a thumbnail version of a video by a 2-D image that ... View full abstract»

Block matching based motion estimation employs conventionally pixel-based sum of absolute differences (SAD) metric for distortion measure. Many fast matching mechanisms have been developed to lower the computational load for block matching, such as those exploiting block feature based or attribute-based SAD calculations. By examining a subblock-sum-based SAD measure, where the subblock-sums can be... View full abstract»

In motion estimation for video codec, reducing the amount of external memory access is critical to reduce power consumption and to minimize performance degradation. Previous search area reuse algorithms to reduce the memory access still suffer from coding efficiency degradation in fast motion video. Previously, we proposed a selective search area reuse (SSAR) algorithm to reduce the amount of exte... View full abstract»

This letter presents an efficient video coding algorithm in the RGB color space. Currently, most video coding algorithms are based on a decorrelated color space such as YUV or YCbCr, which has reduced inter-color redundancy. For high-fidelity video applications, however, it is essential to maintain the original signal fidelity without any mismatch in color space conversion. In this context, the H.... View full abstract»

The problem of efficient bit allocation for dependent video coding within the context of ascribing a quantizer to each macroblock (MB) within a frame is addressed in this letter. Strongly dependent MBs exhibit significant discontinuities on their operational distortion-rate (D-R) convex hulls that nullify the assumptions made for the use of the coordinate-wise steepest-descent (SD) algorithm. A qu... View full abstract»

This letter presents an algorithm for detecting cross-fade scene changes in video carrying 3:2 or mixed film cadence. There are many existing methods for detecting gradual video transitions, but none of the current literature addresses the complication of film cadence. The differences between video and film capture and the mechanics of the telecine transfer process used to convert 24-Hz film to th... View full abstract»

Particle filters have revolutionized object tracking in video sequences. The conventional particle filter, also called the CONDENSATION filter, uses the state transition distribution as the proposal distribution, from which the particles are drawn at each iteration. However, the transition distribution does not take into account the current observations, and thus many particles can be wasted in lo... View full abstract»

We propose an area-based local stereo matching algorithm for accurate disparity estimation across all image regions. A well-known challenge to local stereo methods is to decide an appropriate support window for the pixel under consideration, adapting the window shape or the pixelwise support weight to the underlying scene structures. Our stereo method tackles this problem with two key contribution... View full abstract»