IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology

With many potential industrial applications, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has recently gained more attention for image management and web searching. As an important tool to capture users' preferences and thus to improve the performance of CBIR systems, a variety of relevance feedback (RF) schemes have been developed in recent years. One key issue in RF is: which features (or feature dimens... View full abstract»

In this paper, we introduce a new method to estimate a parametric description of the dominant motion existing in a video sequence, a key task needed to face more complex video analysis problems. In order to do so, we use motion data provided by the MPEG streams. We propose a method based on imaginary straight line tracking to retrieve the projective transformations that describe the dominant motio... View full abstract»

The efficient progressive transmission of a textured 3D model, which has a texture image mapped on a geometric mesh, requires careful organization of the bit stream to quickly present high-resolution visualization on the user's screen. Bit rates for the mesh and the texture need to be properly balanced so that the decoded model has the best visual fidelity during transmission. This problem is addr... View full abstract»

Principal components analysis (PCA) has traditionally been utilized with data expressed in the form of 1-D vectors, but there exists much data such as gray-level images, video sequences, Gabor-filtered images and so on, that are intrinsically in the form of second or higher order tensors. For representations of image objects in their intrinsic form and order rather than concatenating all the objec... View full abstract»

The extracted low-resolution video from a motion compensated 3-D subband/wavelet scalable video coder is unnecessarily sharp and sometimes contains significant aliasing, compared to that obtained by the MPEG4 lowpass filter. In this paper, we propose a content adaptive method for aliasing reduction in subband/wavelet scalable image and video coding. We try to make the low-resolution frame (LL subb... View full abstract»

In this paper, a novel H.264 multiple description technique is proposed. The coding approach is based on the redundant slice representation option, defined in the H.264 standard. In presence of losses, the redundant representation can be used to replace missing portions of the compressed bit stream, thus yielding a certain degree of error resilience. This paper addresses the creation of two balanc... View full abstract»

This paper presents a reduced-reference objective picture quality measurement tool of compressed video. We have used a discriminative analysis of harmonic strength computed from edge-detected pictures to create harmonics gain and loss information that could be associated with the picture. The harmonics gain/loss are derived through the harmonic analysis of the compressed and source pictures to be ... View full abstract»

Integer cosine transform (ICT) is adopted by H.264/AVC for its bit-exact implementation and significant complexity reduction compared to the discrete cosine transform (DCT) with an impact in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of less than 0.02 dB. In this paper, a new technique, named prescaled integer transform (PIT), is proposed. With PIT, while all the merits of ICT are kept, the implementation ... View full abstract»

Since motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) becomes an important temporal prediction scheme in video coding algorithms, this paper presents an efficient temporal prediction engine which not only is the first MCTF hardware work but also supports traditional motion-compensated prediction (MCP) scheme to provide computation scalability. For the prediction stage of MCTF and MCP schemes, modifie... View full abstract»

Existing geometric and radiometric compensation methods for direct-projected augmented reality focus on static projection surfaces rather than dynamic surfaces (with varying geometry in time). We aim at providing an effective framework for projecting a sequence of augmented reality images onto dynamic surfaces without geometric and radiometric distortion. We present our design of a special pattern... View full abstract»

This paper presents a rate control scheme for H.264/AVC scalable extension. Based on our previous work on H.264/AVC rate control, a switched model is proposed to predict the mean absolute difference (MAD) of the residual texture from the available MAD information of the previous frame in the same layer and the same frame in its ldquobase layer.rdquo Thus, abrupt MAD fluctuations could be predicted... View full abstract»

We propose a simple yet effective deblocking method for JPEG compressed image through postfiltering in shifted windows (PSW) of image blocks. The MSE is compared between the original image block and the image blocks in shifted windows, so as to decide whether these altered blocks are used in the smoothing procedure. Our research indicates that there exists strong correlation between the optimal me... View full abstract»

A fast selective-intra mode search algorithm based on the rate-distortion (RD) cost for an inter-frame is proposed for H.264/AVC video encoding. In addition to the inter-mode search procedure with variable block size, an intra mode search causes a significant increase in the complexity and computational load for an inter-frame. To reduce the computational load of the intra mode search at the inter... View full abstract»

Due to the complexity of H.264/AVC, it is very challenging to apply this standard to design a conversational video communication system. This problem is addressed in this paper by using region-of-interest (ROI) based bit allocation and computational power allocation schemes. In our system, the ROI is first detected by using the direct frame difference and skin-tone information. Several coding para... View full abstract»

A rate-distortion (R-D) optimization rate control (RC) algorithm with adaptive initialization is presented for H.264. First, a linear distortion-quantization (D-Q) model is introduced and thus a close-form solution is developed to derive optimal quantization parameters (Qp)for encoding each macroblock. Then we exploit to determine the initial Qp efficiently and adaptively acc... View full abstract»