A DWT based perceptual video coding framework: concepts, issues and techniques

The work in this thesis explore the DWT based video coding by the introduction of a novel DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) / MC (Motion Compensation) / DPCM (Differential Pulse Code Modulation) video coding framework, which adopts the EBCOT as the coding engine for both the intra- and the inter-frame coder. The adaptive switching mechanism between the frame/field coding modes is investigated for this coding framework. The Low-Band-Shift (LBS) is employed for the MC in the DWT domain. The LBS based MC is proven to provide consistent improvement on the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the coded video over the simple Wavelet Tree (WT) based MC. The Adaptive Arithmetic Coding (AAC) is adopted to code the motion information. The context set of the Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (ABAC) for the inter-frame data is redesigned based on the statistical analysis. To further improve the perceived picture quality, a Perceptual Distortion Measure (PDM) based on human vision model is used for the EBCOT of the intra-frame coder. A visibility assessment of the quantization error of various subbands in the DWT domain is performed through subjective tests. In summary, all these findings have solved the issues originated from the proposed perceptual video coding framework. They include: a working DWT/MC/DPCM video coding framework with superior coding efficiency on sequences with translational or head-shoulder motion; an adaptive switching mechanism between frame and field coding mode; an effective LBS based MC scheme in the DWT domain; a methodology of the context design for entropy coding of the inter-frame data; a PDM which replaces the MSE inside the EBCOT coding engine for the intra-frame coder, which provides improvement on the perceived quality of intra-frames; a visibility assessment to the quantization errors in the DWT domain

Compressive sensing based image processing and energy-efficient hardware implementation with application to MRI and JPG 2000

In the present age of technology, the buzzwords are low-power, energy-efficient and compact systems. This directly leads to the date processing and hardware techniques employed in the core of these devices. One of the most power-hungry and space-consuming schemes is that of image/video processing, due to its high quality requirements. In current design methodologies, a point has nearly been reached in which physical and physiological effects limit the ability to just encode data faster. These limits have led to research into methods to reduce the amount of acquired data without degrading image quality and increasing the energy consumption. Compressive sensing (CS) has emerged as an efficient signal compression and recovery technique, which can be used to efficiently reduce the data acquisition and processing. It exploits the sparsity of a signal in a transform domain to perform sampling and stable recovery. This is an alternative paradigm to conventional data processing and is robust in nature. Unlike the conventional methods, CS provides an information capturing paradigm with both sampling and compression. It permits signals to be sampled below the Nyquist rate, and still allowing optimal reconstruction of the signal. The required measurements are far less than those of conventional methods, and the process is non-adaptive, making the sampling process faster and universal. In this thesis, CS methods are applied to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and JPEG 2000, which are popularly used imaging techniques in clinical applications and image compression, respectively. Over the years, MRI has improved dramatically in both imaging quality and speed. This has further revolutionized the field of diagnostic medicine. However, imaging speed, which is essential to many MRI applications still remains a major challenge. The specific challenge addressed in this work is the use of non-Fourier based complex measurement-based data acquisition. This method provides the possibility of reconstructing high quality MRI data with minimal measurements, due to the high incoherence between the two chosen matrices. Similarly, JPEG2000, though providing a high compression, can be further improved upon by using compressive sampling. In addition, the image quality is also improved. Moreover, having a optimized JPEG 2000 architecture reduces the overall processing, and a faster computation when combined with CS. Considering the requirements, this thesis is presented in two parts. In the first part: (1) A complex Hadamard matrix (CHM) based 2D and 3D MRI data acquisition with recovery using a greedy algorithm is proposed. The CHM measurement matrix is shown to satisfy the necessary condition for CS, known as restricted isometry property (RIP). The sparse recovery is done using compressive sampling matching pursuit (CoSaMP); (2) An optimized matrix and modified CoSaMP is presented, which enhances the MRI performance when compared with the conventional sampling; (3) An energy-efficient, cost-efficient hardware design based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) is proposed, to provide a platform for low-cost MRI processing hardware. At every stage, the design is proven to be superior with other commonly used MRI-CS methods and is comparable with the conventional MRI sampling. In the second part, CS techniques are applied to image processing and is combined with JPEG 2000 coder. While CS can reduce the encoding time, the effect on the overall JPEG 2000 encoder is not very significant due to some complex JPEG 2000 algorithms. One problem encountered is the big-level operations in JPEG 2000 arithmetic encoding (AE), which is completely based on bit-level operations. In this work, this problem is tackled by proposing a two-symbol AE with an efficient FPGA based hardware design. Furthermore, this design is energy-efficient, fast and has lower complexity when compared to conventional JPEG 2000 encoding

A human visual system based image coder

Over the years, society has changed considerably due to technological changes, and digital images have become part and parcel of our everyday lives. Irrespective of applications (i.e., digital camera) and services (information sharing, e.g., Youtube, archive / storage), there is the need for high image quality with high compression ratios. Hence, considerable efforts have been invested in the area of image compression. The traditional image compression systems take into account of statistical redundancies inherent in the image data. However, the development and adaptation of vision models, which take into account the properties of the human visual system (HVS), into picture coders have since shown promising results. The objective of the thesis is to propose the implementation of a vision model in two different manners in the JPEG2000 coding system: (a) a Perceptual Colour Distortion Measure (PCDM) for colour images in the encoding stage, and (b) a Perceptual Post Filtering (PPF) algorithm for colour images in the decoding stage. Both implementations are embedded into the JPEG2000 coder. The vision model here exploits the contrast sensitivity, the inter-orientation masking and intra-band masking visual properties of the HVS. Extensive calibration work has been undertaken to fine-tune the 42 model parameters of the PCDM and Just-Noticeable-Difference thresholds of the PPF for colour images. Evaluation with subjective assessments of PCDM based coder has shown perceived quality improvement over the JPEG2000 benchmark with the MSE (mean square error) and CVIS criteria. For the PPF adapted JPEG2000 decoder, performance evaluation has also shown promising results against the JPEG2000 benchmarks. Based on subjective evaluation, when both PCDM and PPF are used in the JPEG2000 coding system, the overall perceived image quality is superior to the stand-alone JPEG2000 with the PCDM

Remote Sensing Data Compression

A huge amount of data is acquired nowadays by different remote sensing systems installed on satellites, aircrafts, and UAV. The acquired data then have to be transferred to image processing centres, stored and/or delivered to customers. In restricted scenarios, data compression is strongly desired or necessary. A wide diversity of coding methods can be used, depending on the requirements and their priority. In addition, the types and properties of images differ a lot, thus, practical implementation aspects have to be taken into account. The Special Issue paper collection taken as basis of this book touches on all of the aforementioned items to some degree, giving the reader an opportunity to learn about recent developments and research directions in the field of image compression. In particular, lossless and near-lossless compression of multi- and hyperspectral images still remains current, since such images constitute data arrays that are of extremely large size with rich information that can be retrieved from them for various applications. Another important aspect is the impact of lossless compression on image classification and segmentation, where a reasonable compromise between the characteristics of compression and the final tasks of data processing has to be achieved. The problems of data transition from UAV-based acquisition platforms, as well as the use of FPGA and neural networks, have become very important. Finally, attempts to apply compressive sensing approaches in remote sensing image processing with positive outcomes are observed. We hope that readers will find our book useful and interestin

Development of Lifting-based VLSI Architectures for Two-Dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform

Two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (2-D DWT) has evolved as an essential part of a modem compression system. It offers superior compression with good image quality and overcomes disadvantage of the discrete cosine transform, which suffers from blocks artifacts that reduces the quality of the inage. The amount of computations involve in 2-D DWT is enormous and cannot be processed by generalpurpose processors when real-time processing is required. Th·"efore, high speed and low power VLSI architecture that computes 2-D DWT effectively is needed. In this research, several VLSI architectures have been developed that meets real-time requirements for 2-D DWT applications. This research iaitially started off by implementing a software simulation program that decorrelates the original image and reconstructs the original image from the decorrelated image. Then, based on the information gained from implementing the simulation program, a new approach for designing lifting-based VLSI architectures for 2-D forward DWT is introduced. As a result, two high performance VLSI architectures that perform 2-D DWT for 5/3 and 9/7 filters are developed based on overlapped and nonoverlapped scan methods. Then, the intermediate architecture is developed, which aim a·: reducing the power consumption of the overlapped areas without using the expensive line buffer. In order to best meet real-time applications of 2-D DWT with demanding requirements in terms of speed and throughput parallelism is explored. The single pipelined intermediate and overlapped architectures are extended to 2-, 3-, and 4-parallel architectures to achieve speed factors of 2, 3, and 4, respectively. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach single and para.llel VLSI architectures for 2-D inverse discrete wavelet transform (2-D IDWT) are developed. Furthermore, 2-D DWT memory architectures, which have been overlooked in the literature, are also developed. Finally, to show the architectural models developed for 2-D DWT are simple to control, the control algorithms for 4-parallel architecture based on the first scan method is developed. To validate architectures develcped in this work five architectures are implemented and simulated on Altera FPGA. In compliance with the terms of the Copyright Act 1987 and the IP Policy of the university, the copyright of this thesis has been reassigned by the author to the legal entity of the university, Institute of Technology PETRONAS Sdn bhd. Due acknowledgement shall always be made of the use of any material contained in, or derived from, this thesis

Sparse representation based hyperspectral image compression and classification

Abstract This thesis presents a research work on applying sparse representation to lossy hyperspectral image compression and hyperspectral image classification. The proposed lossy hyperspectral image compression framework introduces two types of dictionaries distinguished by the terms sparse representation spectral dictionary (SRSD) and multi-scale spectral dictionary (MSSD), respectively. The former is learnt in the spectral domain to exploit the spectral correlations, and the latter in wavelet multi-scale spectral domain to exploit both spatial and spectral correlations in hyperspectral images. To alleviate the computational demand of dictionary learning, either a base dictionary trained offline or an update of the base dictionary is employed in the compression framework. The proposed compression method is evaluated in terms of different objective metrics, and compared to selected state-of-the-art hyperspectral image compression schemes, including JPEG 2000. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of both SRSD and MSSD approaches. For the proposed hyperspectral image classification method, we utilize the sparse coefficients for training support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbour (kNN) classifiers. In particular, the discriminative character of the sparse coefficients is enhanced by incorporating contextual information using local mean filters. The classification performance is evaluated and compared to a number of similar or representative methods. The results show that our approach could outperform other approaches based on SVM or sparse representation. This thesis makes the following contributions. It provides a relatively thorough investigation of applying sparse representation to lossy hyperspectral image compression. Specifically, it reveals the effectiveness of sparse representation for the exploitation of spectral correlations in hyperspectral images. In addition, we have shown that the discriminative character of sparse coefficients can lead to superior performance in hyperspectral image classification.EM201

Novel Motion Anchoring Strategies for Wavelet-based Highly Scalable Video Compression

This thesis investigates new motion anchoring strategies that are targeted at wavelet-based highly scalable video compression (WSVC). We depart from two practices that are deeply ingrained in existing video compression systems. Instead of the commonly used block motion, which has poor scalability attributes, we employ piecewise-smooth motion together with a highly scalable motion boundary description. The combination of this more “physical” motion description together with motion discontinuity information allows us to change the conventional strategy of anchoring motion at target frames to anchoring motion at reference frames, which improves motion inference across time. In the proposed reference-based motion anchoring strategies, motion fields are mapped from reference to target frames, where they serve as prediction references; during this mapping process, disoccluded regions are readily discovered. Observing that motion discontinuities displace with foreground objects, we propose motion-discontinuity driven motion mapping operations that handle traditionally challenging regions around moving objects. The reference-based motion anchoring exposes an intricate connection between temporal frame interpolation (TFI) and video compression. When employed in a compression system, all anchoring strategies explored in this thesis perform TFI once all residual information is quantized to zero at a given temporal level. The interpolation performance is evaluated on both natural and synthetic sequences, where we show favourable comparisons with state-of-the-art TFI schemes. We explore three reference-based motion anchoring strategies. In the first one, the motion anchoring is “flipped” with respect to a hierarchical B-frame structure. We develop an analytical model to determine the weights of the different spatio-temporal subbands, and assess the suitability and benefits of this reference-based WSVC for (highly scalable) video compression. Reduced motion coding cost and improved frame prediction, especially around moving objects, result in improved rate-distortion performance compared to a target-based WSVC. As the thesis evolves, the motion anchoring is progressively simplified to one where all motion is anchored at one base frame; this central motion organization facilitates the incorporation of higher-order motion models, which improve the prediction performance in regions following motion with non-constant velocity

Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity