A Novel Hybrid Approach for Fast Block Based Motion Estimation

The current work presents a novel hybrid approach for motion estimation of various video sequences with a purpose to speed up the entire process without affecting the accuracy. The method integrates the dynamic Zero motion pre-judgment (ZMP) technique with Initial search centers (ISC) along with half way search termination and Small diamond search pattern. Calculation of the initial search centers has been shifted after the process of zero motion pre-judgment unlike most the previous approaches so that the search centers for stationary blocks need not be identified. Proper identification of ISC dismisses the need to use any fast block matching algorithm (BMA) to find the motion vectors (MV), rather a fixed search pattern such as small diamond search pattern is sufficient to use. Half way search termination has also been incorporated into the algorithm which helps in deciding whether the predicted ISC is the actual MV or not which further reduced the number of computations. Simulation results of the complete hybrid approach have been compared to other standard methods in the field. The method presented in the manuscript ensures better video quality with fewer computations

Hardware acceleration architectures for MPEG-Based mobile video platforms: a brief overview

This paper presents a brief overview of past and current hardware acceleration (HwA) approaches that have been proposed for the most computationally intensive compression tools of the MPEG-4 standard. These approaches are classified based on their historical evolution and architectural approach. An analysis of both evolutionary and functional classifications is carried out in order to speculate on the possible trends of the HwA architectures to be employed in mobile video platforms

Supervised Autonomous Locomotion and Manipulation for Disaster Response with a Centaur-like Robot

Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the robot has to adapt to a wide variety of terrains and workspaces during a mission. The centaur-like robot Centauro has a hybrid legged-wheeled base and an anthropomorphic upper body to carry out complex tasks in environments too dangerous for humans. Due to its high number of degrees of freedom, controlling the robot with direct teleoperation approaches is challenging and exhausting. Supervised autonomy approaches are promising to increase quality and speed of control while keeping the flexibility to solve unknown tasks. We developed a set of operator assistance functionalities with different levels of autonomy to control the robot for challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks. The integrated system was evaluated in disaster response scenarios and showed promising performance.Comment: In Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, October 201

Complexity adaptation in H.264/AVC video coder for static cameras

H.264/AVC uses variable block size motion estimation (VBSME) to improve coding gain. However, its complexity is significant and fixed regardless of the required quality or of the scene characteristics. In this paper, we propose an adaptive complexity algorithm based on using the Walsh Hadamard Transform (WHT). VBS automatic partition and skip mode detection algorithms also are proposed. Experimental results show that 70% - 5% of the computation of H.264/AVC is required to achieve the same PSNR

Object-based 2D-to-3D video conversion for effective stereoscopic content generation in 3D-TV applications

Three-dimensional television (3D-TV) has gained increasing popularity in the broadcasting domain, as it enables enhanced viewing experiences in comparison to conventional two-dimensional (2D) TV. However, its application has been constrained due to the lack of essential contents, i.e., stereoscopic videos. To alleviate such content shortage, an economical and practical solution is to reuse the huge media resources that are available in monoscopic 2D and convert them to stereoscopic 3D. Although stereoscopic video can be generated from monoscopic sequences using depth measurements extracted from cues like focus blur, motion and size, the quality of the resulting video may be poor as such measurements are usually arbitrarily defined and appear inconsistent with the real scenes. To help solve this problem, a novel method for object-based stereoscopic video generation is proposed which features i) optical-flow based occlusion reasoning in determining depth ordinal, ii) object segmentation using improved region-growing from masks of determined depth layers, and iii) a hybrid depth estimation scheme using content-based matching (inside a small library of true stereo image pairs) and depth-ordinal based regularization. Comprehensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our proposed 2D-to-3D conversion method in generating stereoscopic videos of consistent depth measurements for 3D-TV applications