Depth error concealment based on decision making

One of the common form of representing stereoscopic video is combination of 2D video with its corresponding depth map which is made by a laser camera to illustrate depth in the video. When this type of video is transmitted over error prone channels, the packet loss leads to frame loss; and mostly this frame lost occur in depth frames. Thus, a depth error concealment based on decision making termed as DM-PV, which exploits high correlation of 2-D image and its corresponding depth map. The 2D image provide information about the missing frame in the depth sequence to assist the decision making process in order to conceal the lost frames. The process involves inserting proper blank frame and duplication of previous frames instead of missing frames in depth sequence. PSNR performance improves over frame copy method has no decision making. Furthermore, subjective quality of stereoscopic video is better using DM-PV

Cross-layer Optimized Wireless Video Surveillance

A wireless video surveillance system contains three major components, the video capture and preprocessing, the video compression and transmission over wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and the video analysis at the receiving end. The coordination of different components is important for improving the end-to-end video quality, especially under the communication resource constraint. Cross-layer control proves to be an efficient measure for optimal system configuration. In this dissertation, we address the problem of implementing cross-layer optimization in the wireless video surveillance system. The thesis work is based on three research projects. In the first project, a single PTU (pan-tilt-unit) camera is used for video object tracking. The problem studied is how to improve the quality of the received video by jointly considering the coding and transmission process. The cross-layer controller determines the optimal coding and transmission parameters, according to the dynamic channel condition and the transmission delay. Multiple error concealment strategies are developed utilizing the special property of the PTU camera motion. In the second project, the binocular PTU camera is adopted for video object tracking. The presented work studied the fast disparity estimation algorithm and the 3D video transcoding over the WSN for real-time applications. The disparity/depth information is estimated in a coarse-to-fine manner using both local and global methods. The transcoding is coordinated by the cross-layer controller based on the channel condition and the data rate constraint, in order to achieve the best view synthesis quality. The third project is applied for multi-camera motion capture in remote healthcare monitoring. The challenge is the resource allocation for multiple video sequences. The presented cross-layer design incorporates the delay sensitive, content-aware video coding and transmission, and the adaptive video coding and transmission to ensure the optimal and balanced quality for the multi-view videos. In these projects, interdisciplinary study is conducted to synergize the surveillance system under the cross-layer optimization framework. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed schemes. The challenges of cross-layer design in existing wireless video surveillance systems are also analyzed to enlighten the future work. Adviser: Song C

Cross-layer Optimized Wireless Video Surveillance

A wireless video surveillance system contains three major components, the video capture and preprocessing, the video compression and transmission over wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and the video analysis at the receiving end. The coordination of different components is important for improving the end-to-end video quality, especially under the communication resource constraint. Cross-layer control proves to be an efficient measure for optimal system configuration. In this dissertation, we address the problem of implementing cross-layer optimization in the wireless video surveillance system. The thesis work is based on three research projects. In the first project, a single PTU (pan-tilt-unit) camera is used for video object tracking. The problem studied is how to improve the quality of the received video by jointly considering the coding and transmission process. The cross-layer controller determines the optimal coding and transmission parameters, according to the dynamic channel condition and the transmission delay. Multiple error concealment strategies are developed utilizing the special property of the PTU camera motion. In the second project, the binocular PTU camera is adopted for video object tracking. The presented work studied the fast disparity estimation algorithm and the 3D video transcoding over the WSN for real-time applications. The disparity/depth information is estimated in a coarse-to-fine manner using both local and global methods. The transcoding is coordinated by the cross-layer controller based on the channel condition and the data rate constraint, in order to achieve the best view synthesis quality. The third project is applied for multi-camera motion capture in remote healthcare monitoring. The challenge is the resource allocation for multiple video sequences. The presented cross-layer design incorporates the delay sensitive, content-aware video coding and transmission, and the adaptive video coding and transmission to ensure the optimal and balanced quality for the multi-view videos. In these projects, interdisciplinary study is conducted to synergize the surveillance system under the cross-layer optimization framework. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed schemes. The challenges of cross-layer design in existing wireless video surveillance systems are also analyzed to enlighten the future work. Adviser: Song C

Stolen Artwork: Deciding Ownership Is No Pretty Picture

This thesis analyzes the power losses in induction machines and how the losses depend on the harmonic content of the applied voltages. Two cases are compared, one case where a machine is fed with a sinusoidial voltage and one case with a modular multilevel converter (M2C). The sine is representing an ideal grid while the M2C represents a case with harmonic content. The usage of converters for electrical drive systems is increasing due to advantages when the rotor speed could be variable by changing the frequency of the voltage. This is usually increasing the efficiency of the overall system, but is also adding harmonics fed to the machine and switching losses in the converter. Low switching losses in the inverter usually create higher harmonic content that instead increases the losses of the machine. The M2C is then proposed as a converter topology that can keep the harmonic content low while keeping the switching losses relatively low. This study focuses on the iron losses, the part of the total losses that is most hard to predict or measure. Today’s methods used to calculate the iron losses are often rough approximations that do not take the impact of the harmonic content of voltage into consideration, even though the iron losses are dependent on the harmonics. Experimental results in the study show that the losses of a M2C-fed case do not differ much from a sine-fed case. The difference could be explained by low increase of iron losses caused by the small harmonic content from the M2C. The increase of iron losses was linked to the harmonic content of the voltage.Detta examensarbete analyserar effektförluster i induktionsmaskiner och hur förlusterna beror på övertonsinnehållet i den matande spänningen. Två fall kommer att jämföras, ett fall där en maskin är matad från en sinus spänning och ett fall med en modulär multinivå omvandlare (M2C). Sinusen representerar ett idealt nät medan M2C representerar ett fall med övertonsinnehåll. Användning av omvandlare för elekriska drivsystem ökar på grund av fördelarna när rotorhastighet kan varieras genom att ändra frekvensen från den matande växelriktaren. Detta ökar vanligtvis verkningsgraden på det sammanlagda systemet, men detta bidrar även med övertonsinnehåll matat till maskinen och switchförluster i omvandlaren. Låga switchförluster i omvandlaren medför oftast ett högt övertonsinnehåll som istället ökar förlusterna i maskinen. M2C är därför föreslaget som en teknik som håller övertonsinnehållet lågt medan switchförlusterna är relativt låga. Denna studie fokuserar på järnförluster, den del av de totala förlusterna som är som svårast att förutse eller mäta. De metoder som finns för att beräkna järnförlusterna är vanligtvis grova skattningar som inte tar hänsyn till inverkan från spänningens övertoninnehåll, även om järnförluster beror på övertonerna i stor utsträckning. Experimentella resultat i studien visar att förlusterna i ett M2C-matat fall inte avviker i stor utsträkning jämte ett sinusmatat fall. Skillnanen kan förklaras utifrån den lilla ökningen av järnförluster från det låga övertonsinnehållet från M2C:n. Järnförlusterna ses vara kopplade till övertonsinnehållet i spänningen

Secrecy, Fear and Transaction Costs: The Business of Soviet Forced Labour in the Early Cold War

In 1949 the Cold War was picking up momentum. The Soviet state had entered its most secretive phase. The official rationale of secrecy was defense against external enemies. One of the Gulag’s most important secrets was the location of its labour camps, scattered across the length and depth of the Soviet Union. As this secret was guarded more and more closely, the camps began to drop out of the Soviet economic universe, losing the ability to share necessary information and do business with civilian persons and institutions without disclosing a state secret: their own location. For some months in 1949 and 1950, the Gulag’s camp chiefs and central administrators struggled with this dilemma without achieving a resolution. This episode teaches us about the costs of Soviet secrecy and raises basic questions about how secrecy was calibrated.Cold War, Forced Labour, Secrecy, Transaction Costs, Soviet Union

No-reference bitstream-based impairment detection for high efficiency video coding

Video distribution over error-prone Internet Protocol (IP) networks results in visual impairments on the received video streams. Objective impairment detection algorithms are crucial for maintaining a high Quality of Experience (QoE) as provided with IPTV distribution. There is a lot of research invested in H.264/AVC impairment detection models and questions rise if these turn obsolete with a transition to the successor of H.264/AVC, called High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). In this paper, first we show that impairments on HEVC compressed sequences are more visible compaired to H.264/AVC encoded sequences. We also show that an impairment detection model designed for H.264/AVC could be reused on HEVC, but that caution is advised. A more accurate model taking into account content classification needed slight modification to remain applicable for HEVC compression video content

Enabling error-resilient internet broadcasting using motion compensated spatial partitioning and packet FEC for the dirac video codec

Video transmission over the wireless or wired network require protection from channel errors since compressed video bitstreams are very sensitive to transmission errors because of the use of predictive coding and variable length coding. In this paper, a simple, low complexity and patent free error-resilient coding is proposed. It is based upon the idea of using spatial partitioning on the motion compensated residual frame without employing the transform coefficient coding. The proposed scheme is intended for open source Dirac video codec in order to enable the codec to be used for Internet broadcasting. By partitioning the wavelet transform coefficients of the motion compensated residual frame into groups and independently processing each group using arithmetic coding and Forward Error Correction (FEC), robustness to transmission errors over the packet erasure wired network could be achieved. Using the Rate Compatibles Punctured Code (RCPC) and Turbo Code (TC) as the FEC, the proposed technique provides gracefully decreasing perceptual quality over packet loss rates up to 30%. The PSNR performance is much better when compared with the conventional data partitioning only methods. Simulation results show that the use of multiple partitioning of wavelet coefficient in Dirac can achieve up to 8 dB PSNR gain over its existing un-partitioned method