46,432 research outputs found
Motion estimation and CABAC VLSI co-processors for real-time high-quality H.264/AVC video coding
Real-time and high-quality video coding is gaining a wide interest in the research and industrial community for different applications. H.264/AVC, a recent standard for high performance video coding, can be successfully exploited in several scenarios including digital video broadcasting, high-definition TV and DVD-based systems, which require to sustain up to tens of Mbits/s. To that purpose this paper proposes optimized architectures for H.264/AVC most critical tasks, Motion estimation and context adaptive binary arithmetic coding. Post synthesis results on sub-micron CMOS standard-cells technologies show that the proposed architectures can actually process in real-time 720 × 480 video sequences at 30 frames/s and grant more than 50 Mbits/s. The achieved circuit complexity and power consumption budgets are suitable for their integration in complex VLSI multimedia systems based either on AHB bus centric on-chip communication system or on novel Network-on-Chip (NoC) infrastructures for MPSoC (Multi-Processor System on Chip
Energy-efficient acceleration of MPEG-4 compression tools
We propose novel hardware accelerator architectures for the most computationally demanding algorithms of the MPEG-4 video compression standard-motion estimation, binary motion estimation (for shape coding), and the forward/inverse discrete cosine transforms (incorporating shape adaptive modes). These accelerators have been designed using general low-energy design philosophies at the algorithmic/architectural abstraction levels. The themes of these philosophies are avoiding waste and trading area/performance for power and energy gains. Each core has been synthesised targeting TSMC 0.09
μm TCBN90LP technology, and the experimental results presented in this paper show that the proposed cores improve upon the prior art
Multi-View Video Packet Scheduling
In multiview applications, multiple cameras acquire the same scene from
different viewpoints and generally produce correlated video streams. This
results in large amounts of highly redundant data. In order to save resources,
it is critical to handle properly this correlation during encoding and
transmission of the multiview data. In this work, we propose a
correlation-aware packet scheduling algorithm for multi-camera networks, where
information from all cameras are transmitted over a bottleneck channel to
clients that reconstruct the multiview images. The scheduling algorithm relies
on a new rate-distortion model that captures the importance of each view in the
scene reconstruction. We propose a problem formulation for the optimization of
the packet scheduling policies, which adapt to variations in the scene content.
Then, we design a low complexity scheduling algorithm based on a trellis search
that selects the subset of candidate packets to be transmitted towards
effective multiview reconstruction at clients. Extensive simulation results
confirm the gain of our scheduling algorithm when inter-source correlation
information is used in the scheduler, compared to scheduling policies with no
information about the correlation or non-adaptive scheduling policies. We
finally show that increasing the optimization horizon in the packet scheduling
algorithm improves the transmission performance, especially in scenarios where
the level of correlation rapidly varies with time
High-speed Video from Asynchronous Camera Array
This paper presents a method for capturing high-speed video using an
asynchronous camera array. Our method sequentially fires each sensor in a
camera array with a small time offset and assembles captured frames into a
high-speed video according to the time stamps. The resulting video, however,
suffers from parallax jittering caused by the viewpoint difference among
sensors in the camera array. To address this problem, we develop a dedicated
novel view synthesis algorithm that transforms the video frames as if they were
captured by a single reference sensor. Specifically, for any frame from a
non-reference sensor, we find the two temporally neighboring frames captured by
the reference sensor. Using these three frames, we render a new frame with the
same time stamp as the non-reference frame but from the viewpoint of the
reference sensor. Specifically, we segment these frames into super-pixels and
then apply local content-preserving warping to warp them to form the new frame.
We employ a multi-label Markov Random Field method to blend these warped
frames. Our experiments show that our method can produce high-quality and
high-speed video of a wide variety of scenes with large parallax, scene
dynamics, and camera motion and outperforms several baseline and
state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: 10 pages, 82 figures, Published at IEEE WACV 201
Objective assessment of region of interest-aware adaptive multimedia streaming quality
Adaptive multimedia streaming relies on controlled
adjustment of content bitrate and consequent video quality variation in order to meet the bandwidth constraints of the communication
link used for content delivery to the end-user. The values of the easy to measure network-related Quality of Service metrics have no direct relationship with the way moving images are
perceived by the human viewer. Consequently variations in the video stream bitrate are not clearly linked to similar variation in the user perceived quality. This is especially true if some human visual system-based adaptation techniques are employed. As research has shown, there are certain image regions in each frame of a video sequence on which the users are more interested than in the others. This paper presents the Region of Interest-based Adaptive Scheme (ROIAS) which adjusts differently the regions within each frame of the streamed multimedia content based on the user interest in them. ROIAS is presented and discussed in terms of the adjustment algorithms employed and their impact on the human perceived video quality. Comparisons with existing approaches, including a constant quality adaptation scheme across the whole frame area, are performed employing two objective metrics which estimate user perceived video quality
Map-Guided Curriculum Domain Adaptation and Uncertainty-Aware Evaluation for Semantic Nighttime Image Segmentation
We address the problem of semantic nighttime image segmentation and improve
the state-of-the-art, by adapting daytime models to nighttime without using
nighttime annotations. Moreover, we design a new evaluation framework to
address the substantial uncertainty of semantics in nighttime images. Our
central contributions are: 1) a curriculum framework to gradually adapt
semantic segmentation models from day to night through progressively darker
times of day, exploiting cross-time-of-day correspondences between daytime
images from a reference map and dark images to guide the label inference in the
dark domains; 2) a novel uncertainty-aware annotation and evaluation framework
and metric for semantic segmentation, including image regions beyond human
recognition capability in the evaluation in a principled fashion; 3) the Dark
Zurich dataset, comprising 2416 unlabeled nighttime and 2920 unlabeled twilight
images with correspondences to their daytime counterparts plus a set of 201
nighttime images with fine pixel-level annotations created with our protocol,
which serves as a first benchmark for our novel evaluation. Experiments show
that our map-guided curriculum adaptation significantly outperforms
state-of-the-art methods on nighttime sets both for standard metrics and our
uncertainty-aware metric. Furthermore, our uncertainty-aware evaluation reveals
that selective invalidation of predictions can improve results on data with
ambiguous content such as our benchmark and profit safety-oriented applications
involving invalid inputs.Comment: IEEE T-PAMI 202
Recent Progress in Image Deblurring
This paper comprehensively reviews the recent development of image
deblurring, including non-blind/blind, spatially invariant/variant deblurring
techniques. Indeed, these techniques share the same objective of inferring a
latent sharp image from one or several corresponding blurry images, while the
blind deblurring techniques are also required to derive an accurate blur
kernel. Considering the critical role of image restoration in modern imaging
systems to provide high-quality images under complex environments such as
motion, undesirable lighting conditions, and imperfect system components, image
deblurring has attracted growing attention in recent years. From the viewpoint
of how to handle the ill-posedness which is a crucial issue in deblurring
tasks, existing methods can be grouped into five categories: Bayesian inference
framework, variational methods, sparse representation-based methods,
homography-based modeling, and region-based methods. In spite of achieving a
certain level of development, image deblurring, especially the blind case, is
limited in its success by complex application conditions which make the blur
kernel hard to obtain and be spatially variant. We provide a holistic
understanding and deep insight into image deblurring in this review. An
analysis of the empirical evidence for representative methods, practical
issues, as well as a discussion of promising future directions are also
presented.Comment: 53 pages, 17 figure
- …