Reliable camera motion estimation from compressed MPEG videos using machine learning approach

As an important feature in characterizing video content, camera motion has been widely applied in various multimedia and computer vision applications. A novel method for fast and reliable estimation of camera motion from MPEG videos is proposed, using support vector machine for estimation in a regression model trained on a synthesized sequence. Experiments conducted on real sequences show that the proposed method yields much improved results in estimating camera motions while the difficulty in selecting valid macroblocks and motion vectors is skipped

Rate-Accuracy Trade-Off In Video Classification With Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Advanced video classification systems decode video frames to derive the necessary texture and motion representations for ingestion and analysis by spatio-temporal deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, when considering visual Internet-of-Things applications, surveillance systems and semantic crawlers of large video repositories, the video capture and the CNN-based semantic analysis parts do not tend to be co-located. This necessitates the transport of compressed video over networks and incurs significant overhead in bandwidth and energy consumption, thereby significantly undermining the deployment potential of such systems. In this paper, we investigate the trade-off between the encoding bitrate and the achievable accuracy of CNN-based video classification models that directly ingest AVC/H.264 and HEVC encoded videos. Instead of retaining entire compressed video bitstreams and applying complex optical flow calculations prior to CNN processing, we only retain motion vector and select texture information at significantly-reduced bitrates and apply no additional processing prior to CNN ingestion. Based on three CNN architectures and two action recognition datasets, we achieve 11%-94% saving in bitrate with marginal effect on classification accuracy. A model-based selection between multiple CNNs increases these savings further, to the point where, if up to 7% loss of accuracy can be tolerated, video classification can take place with as little as 3 kbps for the transport of the required compressed video information to the system implementing the CNN models

Video Classification With CNNs: Using The Codec As A Spatio-Temporal Activity Sensor

We investigate video classification via a two-stream convolutional neural network (CNN) design that directly ingests information extracted from compressed video bitstreams. Our approach begins with the observation that all modern video codecs divide the input frames into macroblocks (MBs). We demonstrate that selective access to MB motion vector (MV) information within compressed video bitstreams can also provide for selective, motion-adaptive, MB pixel decoding (a.k.a., MB texture decoding). This in turn allows for the derivation of spatio-temporal video activity regions at extremely high speed in comparison to conventional full-frame decoding followed by optical flow estimation. In order to evaluate the accuracy of a video classification framework based on such activity data, we independently train two CNN architectures on MB texture and MV correspondences and then fuse their scores to derive the final classification of each test video. Evaluation on two standard datasets shows that the proposed approach is competitive to the best two-stream video classification approaches found in the literature. At the same time: (i) a CPU-based realization of our MV extraction is over 977 times faster than GPU-based optical flow methods; (ii) selective decoding is up to 12 times faster than full-frame decoding; (iii) our proposed spatial and temporal CNNs perform inference at 5 to 49 times lower cloud computing cost than the fastest methods from the literature.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. Extension of ICIP 2017 conference pape

A Fusion Framework for Camouflaged Moving Foreground Detection in the Wavelet Domain

Detecting camouflaged moving foreground objects has been known to be difficult due to the similarity between the foreground objects and the background. Conventional methods cannot distinguish the foreground from background due to the small differences between them and thus suffer from under-detection of the camouflaged foreground objects. In this paper, we present a fusion framework to address this problem in the wavelet domain. We first show that the small differences in the image domain can be highlighted in certain wavelet bands. Then the likelihood of each wavelet coefficient being foreground is estimated by formulating foreground and background models for each wavelet band. The proposed framework effectively aggregates the likelihoods from different wavelet bands based on the characteristics of the wavelet transform. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method significantly outperformed existing methods in detecting camouflaged foreground objects. Specifically, the average F-measure for the proposed algorithm was 0.87, compared to 0.71 to 0.8 for the other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 13 pages, accepted by IEEE TI

Prioritizing Content of Interest in Multimedia Data Compression

Image and video compression techniques make data transmission and storage in digital multimedia systems more efficient and feasible for the system's limited storage and bandwidth. Many generic image and video compression techniques such as JPEG and H.264/AVC have been standardized and are now widely adopted. Despite their great success, we observe that these standard compression techniques are not the best solution for data compression in special types of multimedia systems such as microscopy videos and low-power wireless broadcast systems. In these application-specific systems where the content of interest in the multimedia data is known and well-defined, we should re-think the design of a data compression pipeline. We hypothesize that by identifying and prioritizing multimedia data's content of interest, new compression methods can be invented that are far more effective than standard techniques. In this dissertation, a set of new data compression methods based on the idea of prioritizing the content of interest has been proposed for three different kinds of multimedia systems. I will show that the key to designing efficient compression techniques in these three cases is to prioritize the content of interest in the data. The definition of the content of interest of multimedia data depends on the application. First, I show that for microscopy videos, the content of interest is defined as the spatial regions in the video frame with pixels that don't only contain noise. Keeping data in those regions with high quality and throwing out other information yields to a novel microscopy video compression technique. Second, I show that for a Bluetooth low energy beacon based system, practical multimedia data storage and transmission is possible by prioritizing content of interest. I designed custom image compression techniques that preserve edges in a binary image, or foreground regions of a color image of indoor or outdoor objects. Last, I present a new indoor Bluetooth low energy beacon based augmented reality system that integrates a 3D moving object compression method that prioritizes the content of interest.Doctor of Philosoph

Surveillance centric coding

PhDThe research work presented in this thesis focuses on the development of techniques specific to surveillance videos for efficient video compression with higher processing speed. The Scalable Video Coding (SVC) techniques are explored to achieve higher compression efficiency. The framework of SVC is modified to support Surveillance Centric Coding (SCC). Motion estimation techniques specific to surveillance videos are proposed in order to speed up the compression process of the SCC. The main contributions of the research work presented in this thesis are divided into two groups (i) Efficient Compression and (ii) Efficient Motion Estimation. The paradigm of Surveillance Centric Coding (SCC) is introduced, in which coding aims to achieve bit-rate optimisation and adaptation of surveillance videos for storing and transmission purposes. In the proposed approach the SCC encoder communicates with the Video Content Analysis (VCA) module that detects events of interest in video captured by the CCTV. Bit-rate optimisation and adaptation are achieved by exploiting the scalability properties of the employed codec. Time segments containing events relevant to surveillance application are encoded using high spatiotemporal resolution and quality while the irrelevant portions from the surveillance standpoint are encoded at low spatio-temporal resolution and / or quality. Thanks to the scalability of the resulting compressed bit-stream, additional bit-rate adaptation is possible; for instance for the transmission purposes. Experimental evaluation showed that significant reduction in bit-rate can be achieved by the proposed approach without loss of information relevant to surveillance applications. In addition to more optimal compression strategy, novel approaches to performing efficient motion estimation specific to surveillance videos are proposed and implemented with experimental results. A real-time background subtractor is used to detect the presence of any motion activity in the sequence. Different approaches for selective motion estimation, GOP based, Frame based and Block based, are implemented. In the former, motion estimation is performed for the whole group of pictures (GOP) only when a moving object is detected for any frame of the GOP. iii While for the Frame based approach; each frame is tested for the motion activity and consequently for selective motion estimation. The selective motion estimation approach is further explored at a lower level as Block based selective motion estimation. Experimental evaluation showed that significant reduction in computational complexity can be achieved by applying the proposed strategy. In addition to selective motion estimation, a tracker based motion estimation and fast full search using multiple reference frames has been proposed for the surveillance videos. Extensive testing on different surveillance videos shows benefits of application of proposed approaches to achieve the goals of the SCC