2,673 research outputs found
The contour tree image encoding technique and file format
The process of contourization is presented which converts a raster image into a discrete set of plateaux or contours. These contours can be grouped into a hierarchical structure, defining total spatial inclusion, called a contour tree. A contour coder has been developed which fully describes these contours in a compact and efficient manner and is the basis for an image compression method. Simplification of the contour tree has been undertaken by merging contour tree nodes thus lowering the contour tree's entropy. This can be exploited by the contour coder to increase the image compression ratio. By applying general and simple rules derived from physiological experiments on the human vision system, lossy image compression can be achieved which minimises noticeable artifacts in the simplified image. The contour merging technique offers a complementary lossy compression system to the QDCT (Quantised Discrete Cosine Transform). The artifacts introduced by the two methods are very different; QDCT produces a general blurring and adds extra highlights in the form of overshoots, whereas contour merging sharpens edges, reduces highlights and introduces a degree of false contouring. A format based on the contourization technique which caters for most image types is defined, called the contour tree image format. Image operations directly on this compressed format have been studied which for certain manipulations can offer significant operational speed increases over using a standard raster image format. A couple of examples of operations specific to the contour tree format are presented showing some of the features of the new format.Science and Engineering Research Counci
An innovative two-stage data compression scheme using adaptive block merging technique
Test data has increased enormously owing to the rising on-chip complexity of integrated circuits. It further increases the test data transportation time and tester memory. The non-correlated test bits increase the issue of the test power. This paper presents a two-stage block merging based test data minimization scheme which reduces the test bits, test time and test power. A test data is partitioned into blocks of fixed sizes which are compressed using two-stage encoding technique. In stage one, successive blocks are merged to retain a representative block. In stage two, the retained pattern block is further encoding based on the existence of ten different subcases between the sub-block formed by splitting the retained pattern block into two halves. Non-compatible blocks are also split into two sub-blocks and tried for encoded using lesser bits. Decompression architecture to retrieve the original test data is presented. Simulation results obtained corresponding to different ISCAS′89 benchmarks circuits reflect its effectiveness in achieving better compression
Application-Specific Cache and Prefetching for HEVC CABAC Decoding
Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) is the entropy coding module in the HEVC/H.265 video coding standard. As in its predecessor, H.264/AVC, CABAC is a well-known throughput bottleneck due to its strong data dependencies. Besides other optimizations, the replacement of the context model memory by a smaller cache has been proposed for hardware decoders, resulting in an improved clock frequency. However, the effect of potential cache misses has not been properly evaluated. This work fills the gap by performing an extensive evaluation of different cache configurations. Furthermore, it demonstrates that application-specific context model prefetching can effectively reduce the miss rate and increase the overall performance. The best results are achieved with two cache lines consisting of four or eight context models. The 2 × 8 cache allows a performance improvement of 13.2 percent to 16.7 percent compared to a non-cached decoder due to a 17 percent higher clock frequency and highly effective prefetching. The proposed HEVC/H.265 CABAC decoder allows the decoding of high-quality Full HD videos in real-time using few hardware resources on a low-power FPGA.EC/H2020/645500/EU/Improving European VoD Creative Industry with High Efficiency Video Delivery/Film26
Energy efficient enabling technologies for semantic video processing on mobile devices
Semantic object-based processing will play an increasingly important role in future multimedia systems due to the ubiquity of digital multimedia capture/playback technologies and increasing storage capacity. Although the object based paradigm has many undeniable benefits, numerous technical challenges remain before the applications becomes pervasive, particularly on computational constrained mobile devices. A fundamental issue is the ill-posed problem of semantic object segmentation. Furthermore, on battery powered mobile computing devices, the additional algorithmic complexity of semantic object based processing compared to conventional video processing is highly undesirable both from a real-time operation and battery life perspective. This
thesis attempts to tackle these issues by firstly constraining the solution space and focusing on the
human face as a primary semantic concept of use to users of mobile devices. A novel face detection algorithm is proposed, which from the outset was designed to be amenable to be offloaded from the host microprocessor to dedicated hardware, thereby providing real-time performance and
reducing power consumption. The algorithm uses an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), whose topology and weights are evolved via a genetic algorithm (GA). The computational burden of the ANN evaluation is offloaded to a dedicated hardware accelerator, which is capable of processing
any evolved network topology. Efficient arithmetic circuitry, which leverages modified Booth recoding, column compressors and carry save adders, is adopted throughout the design. To tackle the increased computational costs associated with object tracking or object based shape encoding, a novel energy efficient binary motion estimation architecture is proposed. Energy is reduced in the proposed motion estimation architecture by minimising the redundant operations inherent in the binary data. Both architectures are shown to compare favourable with the relevant prior art
A study of data coding technology developments in the 1980-1985 time frame, volume 2
The source parameters of digitized analog data are discussed. Different data compression schemes are outlined and analysis of their implementation are presented. Finally, bandwidth compression techniques are given for video signals
Digital Color Imaging
This paper surveys current technology and research in the area of digital
color imaging. In order to establish the background and lay down terminology,
fundamental concepts of color perception and measurement are first presented
us-ing vector-space notation and terminology. Present-day color recording and
reproduction systems are reviewed along with the common mathematical models
used for representing these devices. Algorithms for processing color images for
display and communication are surveyed, and a forecast of research trends is
attempted. An extensive bibliography is provided
VLSI architecture design approaches for real-time video processing
This paper discusses the programmable and dedicated approaches for real-time video processing applications. Various VLSI architecture including the design examples of both approaches are reviewed. Finally, discussions of several practical designs in real-time video processing applications are then considered in VLSI architectures to provide significant guidelines to VLSI designers for any further real-time video processing design works
Doctor of Philosophy
dissertationAs the base of the software stack, system-level software is expected to provide ecient and scalable storage, communication, security and resource management functionalities. However, there are many computationally expensive functionalities at the system level, such as encryption, packet inspection, and error correction. All of these require substantial computing power. What's more, today's application workloads have entered gigabyte and terabyte scales, which demand even more computing power. To solve the rapidly increased computing power demand at the system level, this dissertation proposes using parallel graphics pro- cessing units (GPUs) in system software. GPUs excel at parallel computing, and also have a much faster development trend in parallel performance than central processing units (CPUs). However, system-level software has been originally designed to be latency-oriented. GPUs are designed for long-running computation and large-scale data processing, which are throughput-oriented. Such mismatch makes it dicult to t the system-level software with the GPUs. This dissertation presents generic principles of system-level GPU computing developed during the process of creating our two general frameworks for integrating GPU computing in storage and network packet processing. The principles are generic design techniques and abstractions to deal with common system-level GPU computing challenges. Those principles have been evaluated in concrete cases including storage and network packet processing applications that have been augmented with GPU computing. The signicant performance improvement found in the evaluation shows the eectiveness and eciency of the proposed techniques and abstractions. This dissertation also presents a literature survey of the relatively young system-level GPU computing area, to introduce the state of the art in both applications and techniques, and also their future potentials
Audio Coding Based on Integer Transforms
Die Audiocodierung hat sich in den letzten Jahren zu einem sehr
populären Forschungs- und Anwendungsgebiet entwickelt. Insbesondere
gehörangepasste Verfahren zur Audiocodierung, wie etwa MPEG-1 Layer-3
(MP3) oder MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), werden häufig zur
effizienten Speicherung und Übertragung von Audiosignalen verwendet. Für
professionelle Anwendungen, wie etwa die Archivierung und Übertragung im
Studiobereich, ist hingegen eher eine verlustlose Audiocodierung angebracht.
Die bisherigen Ansätze für gehörangepasste und verlustlose
Audiocodierung sind technisch völlig verschieden. Moderne
gehörangepasste Audiocoder basieren meist auf Filterbänken, wie etwa der
überlappenden orthogonalen Transformation "Modifizierte Diskrete
Cosinus-Transformation" (MDCT). Verlustlose Audiocoder hingegen
verwenden meist prädiktive Codierung zur Redundanzreduktion. Nur wenige
Ansätze zur transformationsbasierten verlustlosen Audiocodierung wurden
bisher versucht.
Diese Arbeit präsentiert einen neuen Ansatz hierzu, der das
Lifting-Schema auf die in der gehörangepassten Audiocodierung
verwendeten überlappenden Transformationen anwendet. Dies ermöglicht
eine invertierbare Integer-Approximation der ursprünglichen
Transformation, z.B. die IntMDCT als Integer-Approximation der MDCT. Die
selbe Technik kann auch für Filterbänke mit niedriger Systemverzögerung
angewandt werden. Weiterhin ermöglichen ein neuer, mehrdimensionaler
Lifting-Ansatz und eine Technik zur Spektralformung von
Quantisierungsfehlern eine Verbesserung der Approximation der
ursprünglichen Transformation.
Basierend auf diesen neuen Integer-Transformationen werden in dieser
Arbeit neue Verfahren zur Audiocodierung vorgestellt. Die Verfahren
umfassen verlustlose Audiocodierung, eine skalierbare verlustlose
Erweiterung eines gehörangepassten Audiocoders und einen integrierten
Ansatz zur fein skalierbaren gehörangepassten und verlustlosen
Audiocodierung. Schließlich wird mit Hilfe der Integer-Transformationen
ein neuer Ansatz zur unhörbaren Einbettung von Daten mit hohen
Datenraten in unkomprimierte Audiosignale vorgestellt.In recent years audio coding has become a very popular field for
research and applications. Especially perceptual audio coding schemes,
such as MPEG-1 Layer-3 (MP3) and MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), are
widely used for efficient storage and transmission of music
signals. Nevertheless, for professional applications, such as archiving
and transmission in studio environments, lossless audio coding schemes
are considered more appropriate.
Traditionally, the technical approaches used in perceptual and lossless
audio coding have been separate worlds. In perceptual audio coding, the
use of filter banks, such as the lapped orthogonal transform "Modified
Discrete Cosine Transform" (MDCT), has been the approach of choice being
used by many state of the art coding schemes. On the other hand,
lossless audio coding schemes mostly employ predictive coding of
waveforms to remove redundancy. Only few attempts have been made so far
to use transform coding for the purpose of lossless audio coding.
This work presents a new approach of applying the lifting scheme to
lapped transforms used in perceptual audio coding. This allows for an
invertible integer-to-integer approximation of the original transform,
e.g. the IntMDCT as an integer approximation of the MDCT. The same
technique can also be applied to low-delay filter banks. A generalized,
multi-dimensional lifting approach and a noise-shaping technique are
introduced, allowing to further optimize the accuracy of the
approximation to the original transform.
Based on these new integer transforms, this work presents new audio
coding schemes and applications. The audio coding applications cover
lossless audio coding, scalable lossless enhancement of a perceptual
audio coder and fine-grain scalable perceptual and lossless audio
coding. Finally an approach to data hiding with high data rates in
uncompressed audio signals based on integer transforms is described
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