1,488 research outputs found
Weighted universal image compression
We describe a general coding strategy leading to a family of universal image compression systems designed to give good performance in applications where the statistics of the source to be compressed are not available at design time or vary over time or space. The basic approach considered uses a two-stage structure in which the single source code of traditional image compression systems is replaced with a family of codes designed to cover a large class of possible sources. To illustrate this approach, we consider the optimal design and use of two-stage codes containing collections of vector quantizers (weighted universal vector quantization), bit allocations for JPEG-style coding (weighted universal bit allocation), and transform codes (weighted universal transform coding). Further, we demonstrate the benefits to be gained from the inclusion of perceptual distortion measures and optimal parsing. The strategy yields two-stage codes that significantly outperform their single-stage predecessors. On a sequence of medical images, weighted universal vector quantization outperforms entropy coded vector quantization by over 9 dB. On the same data sequence, weighted universal bit allocation outperforms a JPEG-style code by over 2.5 dB. On a collection of mixed test and image data, weighted universal transform coding outperforms a single, data-optimized transform code (which gives performance almost identical to that of JPEG) by over 6 dB
Simulated Annealing for JPEG Quantization
JPEG is one of the most widely used image formats, but in some ways remains
surprisingly unoptimized, perhaps because some natural optimizations would go
outside the standard that defines JPEG. We show how to improve JPEG compression
in a standard-compliant, backward-compatible manner, by finding improved
default quantization tables. We describe a simulated annealing technique that
has allowed us to find several quantization tables that perform better than the
industry standard, in terms of both compressed size and image fidelity.
Specifically, we derive tables that reduce the FSIM error by over 10% while
improving compression by over 20% at quality level 95 in our tests; we also
provide similar results for other quality levels. While we acknowledge our
approach can in some images lead to visible artifacts under large
magnification, we believe use of these quantization tables, or additional
tables that could be found using our methodology, would significantly reduce
JPEG file sizes with improved overall image quality.Comment: Appendix not included in arXiv version due to size restrictions. For
full paper go to:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/SimAnneal/PAPER/simulated-annealing-jpeg.pd
Navigation domain representation for interactive multiview imaging
Enabling users to interactively navigate through different viewpoints of a
static scene is a new interesting functionality in 3D streaming systems. While
it opens exciting perspectives towards rich multimedia applications, it
requires the design of novel representations and coding techniques in order to
solve the new challenges imposed by interactive navigation. Interactivity
clearly brings new design constraints: the encoder is unaware of the exact
decoding process, while the decoder has to reconstruct information from
incomplete subsets of data since the server can generally not transmit images
for all possible viewpoints due to resource constrains. In this paper, we
propose a novel multiview data representation that permits to satisfy bandwidth
and storage constraints in an interactive multiview streaming system. In
particular, we partition the multiview navigation domain into segments, each of
which is described by a reference image and some auxiliary information. The
auxiliary information enables the client to recreate any viewpoint in the
navigation segment via view synthesis. The decoder is then able to navigate
freely in the segment without further data request to the server; it requests
additional data only when it moves to a different segment. We discuss the
benefits of this novel representation in interactive navigation systems and
further propose a method to optimize the partitioning of the navigation domain
into independent segments, under bandwidth and storage constraints.
Experimental results confirm the potential of the proposed representation;
namely, our system leads to similar compression performance as classical
inter-view coding, while it provides the high level of flexibility that is
required for interactive streaming. Hence, our new framework represents a
promising solution for 3D data representation in novel interactive multimedia
services
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