Near-Lossless Bitonal Image Compression System

The main purpose of this thesis is to develop an efficient near-lossless bitonal compression algorithm and to implement that algorithm on a hardware platform. The current methods for compression of bitonal images include the JBIG and JBIG2 algorithms, however both JBIG and JBIG2 have their disadvantages. Both of these algorithms are covered by patents filed by IBM, making them costly to implement commercially. Also, JBIG only provides means for lossless compression while JBIG2 provides lossy methods only for document-type images. For these reasons a new method for introducing loss and controlling this loss to sustain quality is developed. The lossless bitonal image compression algorithm used for this thesis is called Block Arithmetic Coder for Image Compression (BACIC), which can efficiently compress bitonal images. In this thesis, loss is introduced for cases where better compression efficiency is needed. However, introducing loss in bitonal images is especially difficult, because pixels undergo such a drastic change, either from white to black or black to white. Such pixel flipping introduces salt and pepper noise, which can be very distracting when viewing an image. Two methods are used in combination to control the visual distortion introduced into the image. The first is to keep track of the error created by the flipping of pixels, and using this error to decide whether flipping another pixel will cause the visual distortion to exceed a predefined threshold. The second method is region of interest consideration. In this method, lower loss or no loss is introduced into the important parts of an image, and higher loss is introduced into the less important parts. This allows for a good quality image while increasing the compression efficiency. Also, the ability of BACIC to compress grayscale images is studied and BACICm, a multiplanar BACIC algorithm, is created. A hardware implementation of the BACIC lossless bitonal image compression algorithm is also designed. The hardware implementation is done using VHDL targeting a Xilinx FPGA, which is very useful, because of its flexibility. The programmed FPGA could be included in a product of the facsimile or printing industry to handle the compression or decompression internal to the unit, giving it an advantage in the marketplace

Survey on Multi-Document Summarization: Systematic Literature Review

In this era of information technology, abundant information is available on the internet in the form of web pages and documents on any given topic. Finding the most relevant and informative content out of these huge number of documents, without spending several hours of reading has become a very challenging task. Various methods of multi-document summarization have been developed to overcome this problem. The multi-document summarization methods try to produce high-quality summaries of documents with low redundancy. This study conducts a systematic literature review of existing methods for multi-document summarization methods and provides an in-depth analysis of performance achieved by these methods. The findings of the study show that more effective methods are still required for getting higher accuracy of these methods. The study also identifies some open challenges that can gain the attention of future researchers of this domain

Techniques for document image processing in compressed domain

The main objective for image compression is usually considered the minimization of storage space. However, as the need to frequently access images increases, it is becoming more important for people to process the compressed representation directly. In this work, the techniques that can be applied directly and efficiently to digital information encoded by a given compression algorithm are investigated. Lossless compression schemes and information processing algorithms for binary document images and text data are two closely related areas bridged together by the fast processing of coded data. The compressed domains, which have been addressed in this work, i.e., the ITU fax standards and JBIG standard, are two major schemes used for document compression. Based on ITU Group IV, a modified coding scheme, MG4, which explores the 2-dimensional correlation between scan lines, is developed. From the viewpoints of compression efficiency and processing flexibility of image operations, the MG4 coding principle and its feature-preserving behavior in the compressed domain are investigated and examined. Two popular coding schemes in the area of bi-level image compression, run-length and Group IV, are studied and compared with MG4 in the three aspects of compression complexity, compression ratio, and feasibility of compressed-domain algorithms. In particular, for the operations of connected component extraction, skew detection, and rotation, MG4 shows a significant speed advantage over conventional algorithms. Some useful techniques for processing the JBIG encoded images directly in the compressed domain, or concurrently while they are being decoded, are proposed and generalized; In the second part of this work, the possibility of facilitating image processing in the wavelet transform domain is investigated. The textured images can be distinguished from each other by examining their wavelet transforms. The basic idea is that highly textured regions can be segmented using feature vectors extracted from high frequency bands based on the observation that textured images have large energies in both high and middle frequencies while images in which the grey level varies smoothly are heavily dominated by the low-frequency channels in the wavelet transform domain. As a result, a new method is developed and implemented to detect textures and abnormalities existing in document images by using polynomial wavelets. Segmentation experiments indicate that this approach is superior to other traditional methods in terms of memory space and processing time

DCT Implementation on GPU

There has been a great progress in the field of graphics processors. Since, there is no rise in the speed of the normal CPU processors; Designers are coming up with multi-core, parallel processors. Because of their popularity in parallel processing, GPUs are becoming more and more attractive for many applications. With the increasing demand in utilizing GPUs, there is a great need to develop operating systems that handle the GPU to full capacity. GPUs offer a very efficient environment for many image processing applications. This thesis explores the processing power of GPUs for digital image compression using Discrete cosine transform

Automated creation of Wikipedia articles

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-84).This thesis describes an automatic approach for producing Wikipedia articles. The wealth of information present on the Internet is currently untapped for many topics of secondary concern. Creating articles requires a great deal of time spent collecting information and editing. This thesis presents a solution. The proposed algorithm creates a new article by querying the Internet, selecting relevant excerpts from the search results, and synthesizing the best excerpts into a coherent document. This work builds on previous work in document summarization, web question answering, and Integer Linear Programming. At the core of our approach is a method for using existing human-authored Wikipedia articles to learn a content selection mechanism. Articles in the same category often present similar types of information; we can leverage this to create content templates for new articles. Once a template has been created, we use classification and clustering techniques to select a single best excerpt for each section. Finally, we use Integer Linear Programming techniques to eliminate any redundancy over the complete article. We evaluate our system for both individual sections and complete articles, using both human and automatic evaluation methods. The results indicate that articles created by our system are close to human-authored Wikipedia entries in quality of content selection. We show that both human and automatic evaluation metrics are in agreement; therefore, automatic methods are a reasonable evaluation tool for this task. We also empirically demonstrate that explicit modeling of content structure is essential for improving the quality of an automatically-produced article.by Christina Sauper.S.M

Adaptive edge-based prediction for lossless image compression

Many lossless image compression methods have been suggested with established results hard to surpass. However there are some aspects that can be considered to improve the performance further. This research focuses on two-phase prediction-encoding method, separately studying each and suggesting new techniques.;In the prediction module, proposed Edge-Based-Predictor (EBP) and Least-Squares-Edge-Based-Predictor (LS-EBP) emphasizes on image edges and make predictions accordingly. EBP is a gradient based nonlinear adaptive predictor. EBP switches between prediction-rules based on few threshold parameters automatically determined by a pre-analysis procedure, which makes a first pass. The LS-EBP also uses these parameters, but optimizes the prediction for each pre-analysis assigned edge location, thus applying least-square approach only at the edge points.;For encoding module: a novel Burrows Wheeler Transform (BWT) inspired method is suggested, which performs better than applying the BWT directly on the images. We also present a context-based adaptive error modeling and encoding scheme. When coupled with the above-mentioned prediction schemes, the result is the best-known compression performance in the genre of compression schemes with same time and space complexity