Combined Industry, Space and Earth Science Data Compression Workshop

The sixth annual Space and Earth Science Data Compression Workshop and the third annual Data Compression Industry Workshop were held as a single combined workshop. The workshop was held April 4, 1996 in Snowbird, Utah in conjunction with the 1996 IEEE Data Compression Conference, which was held at the same location March 31 - April 3, 1996. The Space and Earth Science Data Compression sessions seek to explore opportunities for data compression to enhance the collection, analysis, and retrieval of space and earth science data. Of particular interest is data compression research that is integrated into, or has the potential to be integrated into, a particular space or earth science data information system. Preference is given to data compression research that takes into account the scien- tist's data requirements, and the constraints imposed by the data collection, transmission, distribution and archival systems

Object-based video representations: shape compression and object segmentation

Object-based video representations are considered to be useful for easing the process of multimedia content production and enhancing user interactivity in multimedia productions. Object-based video presents several new technical challenges, however. Firstly, as with conventional video representations, compression of the video data is a requirement. For object-based representations, it is necessary to compress the shape of each video object as it moves in time. This amounts to the compression of moving binary images. This is achieved by the use of a technique called context-based arithmetic encoding. The technique is utilised by applying it to rectangular pixel blocks and as such it is consistent with the standard tools of video compression. The blockbased application also facilitates well the exploitation of temporal redundancy in the sequence of binary shapes. For the first time, context-based arithmetic encoding is used in conjunction with motion compensation to provide inter-frame compression. The method, described in this thesis, has been thoroughly tested throughout the MPEG-4 core experiment process and due to favourable results, it has been adopted as part of the MPEG-4 video standard. The second challenge lies in the acquisition of the video objects. Under normal conditions, a video sequence is captured as a sequence of frames and there is no inherent information about what objects are in the sequence, not to mention information relating to the shape of each object. Some means for segmenting semantic objects from general video sequences is required. For this purpose, several image analysis tools may be of help and in particular, it is believed that video object tracking algorithms will be important. A new tracking algorithm is developed based on piecewise polynomial motion representations and statistical estimation tools, e.g. the expectationmaximisation method and the minimum description length principle

Effective Features for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment on Mobile Devices

The goal of this thesis is the analysis and development of a no-reference image quality assessment algorithm. Algorithms of this kind are increasingly employed in multimedia applications with the aim of delivering higher quality of service. In order to achieve the goal, a state-of-art no-reference algorithm was used as a groundwork to improve. The proposed model is intended to be deployed in low-resources mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet

Dimensionality reduction and sparse representations in computer vision

The proliferation of camera equipped devices, such as netbooks, smartphones and game stations, has led to a significant increase in the production of visual content. This visual information could be used for understanding the environment and offering a natural interface between the users and their surroundings. However, the massive amounts of data and the high computational cost associated with them, encumbers the transfer of sophisticated vision algorithms to real life systems, especially ones that exhibit resource limitations such as restrictions in available memory, processing power and bandwidth. One approach for tackling these issues is to generate compact and descriptive representations of image data by exploiting inherent redundancies. We propose the investigation of dimensionality reduction and sparse representations in order to accomplish this task. In dimensionality reduction, the aim is to reduce the dimensions of the space where image data reside in order to allow resource constrained systems to handle them and, ideally, provide a more insightful description. This goal is achieved by exploiting the inherent redundancies that many classes of images, such as faces under different illumination conditions and objects from different viewpoints, exhibit. We explore the description of natural images by low dimensional non-linear models called image manifolds and investigate the performance of computer vision tasks such as recognition and classification using these low dimensional models. In addition to dimensionality reduction, we study a novel approach in representing images as a sparse linear combination of dictionary examples. We investigate how sparse image representations can be used for a variety of tasks including low level image modeling and higher level semantic information extraction. Using tools from dimensionality reduction and sparse representation, we propose the application of these methods in three hierarchical image layers, namely low-level features, mid-level structures and high-level attributes. Low level features are image descriptors that can be extracted directly from the raw image pixels and include pixel intensities, histograms, and gradients. In the first part of this work, we explore how various techniques in dimensionality reduction, ranging from traditional image compression to the recently proposed Random Projections method, affect the performance of computer vision algorithms such as face detection and face recognition. In addition, we discuss a method that is able to increase the spatial resolution of a single image, without using any training examples, according to the sparse representations framework. In the second part, we explore mid-level structures, including image manifolds and sparse models, produced by abstracting information from low-level features and offer compact modeling of high dimensional data. We propose novel techniques for generating more descriptive image representations and investigate their application in face recognition and object tracking. In the third part of this work, we propose the investigation of a novel framework for representing the semantic contents of images. This framework employs high level semantic attributes that aim to bridge the gap between the visual information of an image and its textual description by utilizing low level features and mid level structures. This innovative paradigm offers revolutionary possibilities including recognizing the category of an object from purely textual information without providing any explicit visual example

Semantic and effective communications

Shannon and Weaver categorized communications into three levels of problems: the technical problem, which tries to answer the question "how accurately can the symbols of communication be transmitted?"; the semantic problem, which asks the question "how precisely do the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning?"; the effectiveness problem, which strives to answer the question "how effectively does the received meaning affect conduct in the desired way?". Traditionally, communication technologies mainly addressed the technical problem, ignoring the semantics or the effectiveness problems. Recently, there has been increasing interest to address the higher level semantic and effectiveness problems, with proposals ranging from semantic to goal oriented communications. In this thesis, we propose to formulate the semantic problem as a joint source-channel coding (JSCC) problem and the effectiveness problem as a multi-agent partially observable Markov decision process (MA-POMDP). As such, for the semantic problem, we propose DeepWiVe, the first-ever end-to-end JSCC video transmission scheme that leverages the power of deep neural networks (DNNs) to directly map video signals to channel symbols, combining video compression, channel coding, and modulation steps into a single neural transform. We also further show that it is possible to use predefined constellation designs as well as secure the physical layer communication against eavesdroppers for deep learning (DL) driven JSCC schemes, making such schemes much more viable for deployment in the real world. For the effectiveness problem, we propose a novel formulation by considering multiple agents communicating over a noisy channel in order to achieve better coordination and cooperation in a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework. Specifically, we consider a MA-POMDP, in which the agents, in addition to interacting with the environment, can also communicate with each other over a noisy communication channel. The noisy communication channel is considered explicitly as part of the dynamics of the environment, and the message each agent sends is part of the action that the agent can take. As a result, the agents learn not only to collaborate with each other but also to communicate "effectively'' over a noisy channel. Moreover, we show that this framework generalizes both the semantic and technical problems. In both instances, we show that the resultant communication scheme is superior to one where the communication is considered separately from the underlying semantic or goal of the problem.Open Acces

Sparse and Redundant Representations for Inverse Problems and Recognition

Sparse and redundant representation of data enables the description of signals as linear combinations of a few atoms from a dictionary. In this dissertation, we study applications of sparse and redundant representations in inverse problems and object recognition. Furthermore, we propose two novel imaging modalities based on the recently introduced theory of Compressed Sensing (CS). This dissertation consists of four major parts. In the first part of the dissertation, we study a new type of deconvolution algorithm that is based on estimating the image from a shearlet decomposition. Shearlets provide a multi-directional and multi-scale decomposition that has been mathematically shown to represent distributed discontinuities such as edges better than traditional wavelets. We develop a deconvolution algorithm that allows for the approximation inversion operator to be controlled on a multi-scale and multi-directional basis. Furthermore, we develop a method for the automatic determination of the threshold values for the noise shrinkage for each scale and direction without explicit knowledge of the noise variance using a generalized cross validation method. In the second part of the dissertation, we study a reconstruction method that recovers highly undersampled images assumed to have a sparse representation in a gradient domain by using partial measurement samples that are collected in the Fourier domain. Our method makes use of a robust generalized Poisson solver that greatly aids in achieving a significantly improved performance over similar proposed methods. We will demonstrate by experiments that this new technique is more flexible to work with either random or restricted sampling scenarios better than its competitors. In the third part of the dissertation, we introduce a novel Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging modality which can provide a high resolution map of the spatial distribution of targets and terrain using a significantly reduced number of needed transmitted and/or received electromagnetic waveforms. We demonstrate that this new imaging scheme, requires no new hardware components and allows the aperture to be compressed. Also, it presents many new applications and advantages which include strong resistance to countermesasures and interception, imaging much wider swaths and reduced on-board storage requirements. The last part of the dissertation deals with object recognition based on learning dictionaries for simultaneous sparse signal approximations and feature extraction. A dictionary is learned for each object class based on given training examples which minimize the representation error with a sparseness constraint. A novel test image is then projected onto the span of the atoms in each learned dictionary. The residual vectors along with the coefficients are then used for recognition. Applications to illumination robust face recognition and automatic target recognition are presented

Advanced Restoration Techniques for Images and Disparity Maps

With increasing popularity of digital cameras, the field of Computa- tional Photography emerges as one of the most demanding areas of research. In this thesis we study and develop novel priors and op- timization techniques to solve inverse problems, including disparity estimation and image restoration. The disparity map estimation method proposed in this thesis incor- porates multiple frames of a stereo video sequence to ensure temporal coherency. To enforce smoothness, we use spatio-temporal connec- tions between the pixels of the disparity map to constrain our solution. Apart from smoothness, we enforce a consistency constraint for the disparity assignments by using connections between the left and right views. These constraints are then formulated in a graphical model, which we solve using mean-field approximation. We use a filter-based mean-field optimization that perform efficiently by updating the dis- parity variables in parallel. The parallel updates scheme, however, is not guaranteed to converge to a stationary point. To compare and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we developed a new optimization technique that uses sequential updates, which runs ef- ficiently and guarantees convergence. Our empirical results indicate that with proper initialization, we can employ the parallel update scheme and efficiently optimize our disparity maps without loss of quality. Our method ranks amongst the state of the art in common benchmarks, and significantly reduces the temporal flickering artifacts in the disparity maps. In the second part of this thesis, we address several image restora- tion problems such as image deblurring, demosaicing and super- resolution. We propose to use denoising autoencoders to learn an approximation of the true natural image distribution. We parametrize our denoisers using deep neural networks and show that they learn the gradient of the smoothed density of natural images. Based on this analysis, we propose a restoration technique that moves the so- lution towards the local extrema of this distribution by minimizing the difference between the input and output of our denoiser. Weii demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a single trained neural network in several restoration tasks such as deblurring and super-resolution. In a more general framework, we define a new Bayes formulation for the restoration problem, which leads to a more efficient and robust estimator. The proposed framework achieves state of the art performance in various restoration tasks such as deblurring and demosaicing, and also for more challenging tasks such as noise- and kernel-blind image deblurring. Keywords. disparity map estimation, stereo matching, mean-field optimization, graphical models, image processing, linear inverse prob- lems, image restoration, image deblurring, image denoising, single image super-resolution, image demosaicing, deep neural networks, denoising autoencoder

AUTOMATED ESTIMATION, REDUCTION, AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF VIDEO NOISE FROM DIFFERENT SOURCES

Estimating and removing noise from video signals is important to increase either the visual quality of video signals or the performance of video processing algorithms such as compression or segmentation where noise estimation or reduction is a pre-processing step. To estimate and remove noise, effective methods use both spatial and temporal information to increase the reliability of signal extraction from noise. The objective of this thesis is to introduce a video system having three novel techniques to estimate and reduce video noise from different sources, both effectively and efficiently and assess video quality without considering a reference non-noisy video. The first (intensity-variances based homogeneity classification) technique estimates visual noise of different types in images and video signals. The noise can be white Gaussian noise, mixed Poissonian- Gaussian (signal-dependent white) noise, or processed (frequency-dependent) noise. The method is based on the classification of intensity-variances of signal patches in order to find homogeneous regions that best represent the noise signal in the input signal. The method assumes that noise is signal-independent in each intensity class. To find homogeneous regions, the method works on the downsampled input image and divides it into patches. Each patch is assigned to an intensity class, whereas outlier patches are rejected. Then the most homogeneous cluster is selected and its noise variance is considered as the peak of noise variance. To account for processed noise, we estimate the degree of spatial correlation. To account for temporal noise variations a stabilization process is proposed. We show that the proposed method competes related state-of-the-art in noise estimation. The second technique provides solutions to remove real-world camera noise such as signal-independent, signal-dependent noise, and frequency-dependent noise. Firstly, we propose a noise equalization method in intensity and frequency domain which enables a white Gaussian noise filter to handle real noise. Our experiments confirm the quality improvement under real noise while white Gaussian noise filter is used with our equalization method. Secondly, we propose a band-limited time-space video denoiser which reduces video noise of different types. This denoiser consists of: 1) intensity-domain noise equalization to account for signal dependency, 2) band-limited anti-blocking time-domain filtering of current frame using motion-compensated previous and subsequent frames, 3) spatial filtering combined with noise frequency equalizer to remove residual noise left from temporal filtering, and 4) intensity de-equalization to invert the first step. To decrease the chance of motion blur, temporal weights are calculated using two levels of error estimation; coarse (blocklevel) and fine (pixel-level). We correct the erroneous motion vectors by creating a homography from reliable motion vectors. To eliminate blockiness in block-based temporal filter, we propose three ideas: interpolation of block-level error, a band-limited filtering by subtracting the back-signal beforehand, and two-band motion compensation. The proposed time-space filter is parallelizable to be significantly accelerated by GPU. We show that the proposed method competes related state-ofthe- art in video denoising. The third (sparsity and dominant orientation quality index) technique is a new method to assess the quality of the denoised video frames without a reference (clean frames). In many image and video applications, a quantitative measure of image content, noise, and blur is required to facilitate quality assessment, when the ground-truth is not available. We propose a fast method to find the dominant orientation of image patches, which is used to decompose them into singular values. Combining singular values with the sparsity of the patch in the transform domain, we measure the possible image content and noise of the patches and of the whole image. To measure the effect of noise accurately, our method takes both low and high textured patches into account. Before analyzing the patches, we apply a shrinkage in the transform domain to increase the contrast of genuine image structure. We show that the proposed method is useful to select parameters of denoising algorithms automatically in different noise scenarios such as white Gaussian and real noise. Our objective and subjective results confirm the correspondence between the measured quality and the ground-truth and proposed method rivals related state-of-the-art approaches

AI for time-resolved imaging: from fluorescence lifetime to single-pixel time of flight

Time-resolved imaging is a field of optics which measures the arrival time of light on the camera. This thesis looks at two time-resolved imaging modalities: fluorescence lifetime imaging and time-of-flight measurement for depth imaging and ranging. Both of these applications require temporal accuracy on the order of pico- or nanosecond (10−12 − 10−9s) scales. This demands special camera technology and optics that can sample light-intensity extremely quickly, much faster than an ordinary video camera. However, such detectors can be very expensive compared to regular cameras while offering lower image quality. Further, information of interest is often hidden (encoded) in the raw temporal data. Therefore, computational imaging algorithms are used to enhance, analyse and extract information from time-resolved images. "A picture is worth a thousand words". This describes a fundamental blessing and curse of image analysis: images contain extreme amounts of data. Consequently, it is very difficult to design algorithms that encompass all the possible pixel permutations and combinations that can encode this information. Fortunately, the rise of AI and machine learning (ML) allow us to instead create algorithms in a data-driven way. This thesis demonstrates the application of ML to time-resolved imaging tasks, ranging from parameter estimation in noisy data and decoding of overlapping information, through super-resolution, to inferring 3D information from 1D (temporal) data