Strategies for Searching Video Content with Text Queries or Video Examples

The large number of user-generated videos uploaded on to the Internet everyday has led to many commercial video search engines, which mainly rely on text metadata for search. However, metadata is often lacking for user-generated videos, thus these videos are unsearchable by current search engines. Therefore, content-based video retrieval (CBVR) tackles this metadata-scarcity problem by directly analyzing the visual and audio streams of each video. CBVR encompasses multiple research topics, including low-level feature design, feature fusion, semantic detector training and video search/reranking. We present novel strategies in these topics to enhance CBVR in both accuracy and speed under different query inputs, including pure textual queries and query by video examples. Our proposed strategies have been incorporated into our submission for the TRECVID 2014 Multimedia Event Detection evaluation, where our system outperformed other submissions in both text queries and video example queries, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed approaches

Rate-distortion adaptive vector quantization for wavelet imagecoding

We propose a wavelet image coding scheme using rate-distortion adaptive tree-structured residual vector quantization. Wavelet transform coefficient coding is based on the pyramid hierarchy (zero-tree), but rather than determining the zero-tree relation from the coarsest subband to the finest by hard thresholding, the prediction in our scheme is achieved by rate-distortion optimization with adaptive vector quantization on the wavelet coefficients from the finest subband to the coarsest. The proposed method involves only integer operations and can be implemented with very low computational complexity. The preliminary experiments have shown some encouraging results: a PSNR of 30.93 dB is obtained at 0.174 bpp on the test image LENA (512×512