Depth Superresolution using Motion Adaptive Regularization

Spatial resolution of depth sensors is often significantly lower compared to that of conventional optical cameras. Recent work has explored the idea of improving the resolution of depth using higher resolution intensity as a side information. In this paper, we demonstrate that further incorporating temporal information in videos can significantly improve the results. In particular, we propose a novel approach that improves depth resolution, exploiting the space-time redundancy in the depth and intensity using motion-adaptive low-rank regularization. Experiments confirm that the proposed approach substantially improves the quality of the estimated high-resolution depth. Our approach can be a first component in systems using vision techniques that rely on high resolution depth information

Predictive Encoding of Contextual Relationships for Perceptual Inference, Interpolation and Prediction

We propose a new neurally-inspired model that can learn to encode the global relationship context of visual events across time and space and to use the contextual information to modulate the analysis by synthesis process in a predictive coding framework. The model learns latent contextual representations by maximizing the predictability of visual events based on local and global contextual information through both top-down and bottom-up processes. In contrast to standard predictive coding models, the prediction error in this model is used to update the contextual representation but does not alter the feedforward input for the next layer, and is thus more consistent with neurophysiological observations. We establish the computational feasibility of this model by demonstrating its ability in several aspects. We show that our model can outperform state-of-art performances of gated Boltzmann machines (GBM) in estimation of contextual information. Our model can also interpolate missing events or predict future events in image sequences while simultaneously estimating contextual information. We show it achieves state-of-art performances in terms of prediction accuracy in a variety of tasks and possesses the ability to interpolate missing frames, a function that is lacking in GBM

Multi-View Video Packet Scheduling

In multiview applications, multiple cameras acquire the same scene from different viewpoints and generally produce correlated video streams. This results in large amounts of highly redundant data. In order to save resources, it is critical to handle properly this correlation during encoding and transmission of the multiview data. In this work, we propose a correlation-aware packet scheduling algorithm for multi-camera networks, where information from all cameras are transmitted over a bottleneck channel to clients that reconstruct the multiview images. The scheduling algorithm relies on a new rate-distortion model that captures the importance of each view in the scene reconstruction. We propose a problem formulation for the optimization of the packet scheduling policies, which adapt to variations in the scene content. Then, we design a low complexity scheduling algorithm based on a trellis search that selects the subset of candidate packets to be transmitted towards effective multiview reconstruction at clients. Extensive simulation results confirm the gain of our scheduling algorithm when inter-source correlation information is used in the scheduler, compared to scheduling policies with no information about the correlation or non-adaptive scheduling policies. We finally show that increasing the optimization horizon in the packet scheduling algorithm improves the transmission performance, especially in scenarios where the level of correlation rapidly varies with time

Statistical framework for video decoding complexity modeling and prediction

Video decoding complexity modeling and prediction is an increasingly important issue for efficient resource utilization in a variety of applications, including task scheduling, receiver-driven complexity shaping, and adaptive dynamic voltage scaling. In this paper we present a novel view of this problem based on a statistical framework perspective. We explore the statistical structure (clustering) of the execution time required by each video decoder module (entropy decoding, motion compensation, etc.) in conjunction with complexity features that are easily extractable at encoding time (representing the properties of each module's input source data). For this purpose, we employ Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and an expectation-maximization algorithm to estimate the joint execution-time - feature probability density function (PDF). A training set of typical video sequences is used for this purpose in an offline estimation process. The obtained GMM representation is used in conjunction with the complexity features of new video sequences to predict the execution time required for the decoding of these sequences. Several prediction approaches are discussed and compared. The potential mismatch between the training set and new video content is addressed by adaptive online joint-PDF re-estimation. An experimental comparison is performed to evaluate the different approaches and compare the proposed prediction scheme with related resource prediction schemes from the literature. The usefulness of the proposed complexity-prediction approaches is demonstrated in an application of rate-distortion-complexity optimized decoding

Detection of dirt impairments from archived film sequences : survey and evaluations

Film dirt is the most commonly encountered artifact in archive restoration applications. Since dirt usually appears as a temporally impulsive event, motion-compensated interframe processing is widely applied for its detection. However, motion-compensated prediction requires a high degree of complexity and can be unreliable when motion estimation fails. Consequently, many techniques using spatial or spatiotemporal filtering without motion were also been proposed as alternatives. A comprehensive survey and evaluation of existing methods is presented, in which both qualitative and quantitative performances are compared in terms of accuracy, robustness, and complexity. After analyzing these algorithms and identifying their limitations, we conclude with guidance in choosing from these algorithms and promising directions for future research