44,520 research outputs found
Spread spectrum-based video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection
Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2263 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Digital technologies know an unprecedented expansion in the last years. The consumer can
now benefit from hardware and software which was considered state-of-the-art several years
ago. The advantages offered by the digital technologies are major but the same digital
technology opens the door for unlimited piracy. Copying an analogue VCR tape was certainly
possible and relatively easy, in spite of various forms of protection, but due to the analogue
environment, the subsequent copies had an inherent loss in quality. This was a natural way of
limiting the multiple copying of a video material. With digital technology, this barrier
disappears, being possible to make as many copies as desired, without any loss in quality
whatsoever. Digital watermarking is one of the best available tools for fighting this threat.
The aim of the present work was to develop a digital watermarking system compliant with the
recommendations drawn by the EBU, for video broadcast monitoring. Since the watermark
can be inserted in either spatial domain or transform domain, this aspect was investigated and
led to the conclusion that wavelet transform is one of the best solutions available. Since
watermarking is not an easy task, especially considering the robustness under various attacks
several techniques were employed in order to increase the capacity/robustness of the system:
spread-spectrum and modulation techniques to cast the watermark, powerful error correction
to protect the mark, human visual models to insert a robust mark and to ensure its invisibility.
The combination of these methods led to a major improvement, but yet the system wasn't
robust to several important geometrical attacks. In order to achieve this last milestone, the
system uses two distinct watermarks: a spatial domain reference watermark and the main
watermark embedded in the wavelet domain. By using this reference watermark and techniques
specific to image registration, the system is able to determine the parameters of the attack and
revert it. Once the attack was reverted, the main watermark is recovered. The final result is a
high capacity, blind DWr-based video watermarking system, robust to a wide range of attacks.BBC Research & Developmen
Deep Sketch Hashing: Fast Free-hand Sketch-Based Image Retrieval
Free-hand sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is a specific cross-view
retrieval task, in which queries are abstract and ambiguous sketches while the
retrieval database is formed with natural images. Work in this area mainly
focuses on extracting representative and shared features for sketches and
natural images. However, these can neither cope well with the geometric
distortion between sketches and images nor be feasible for large-scale SBIR due
to the heavy continuous-valued distance computation. In this paper, we speed up
SBIR by introducing a novel binary coding method, named \textbf{Deep Sketch
Hashing} (DSH), where a semi-heterogeneous deep architecture is proposed and
incorporated into an end-to-end binary coding framework. Specifically, three
convolutional neural networks are utilized to encode free-hand sketches,
natural images and, especially, the auxiliary sketch-tokens which are adopted
as bridges to mitigate the sketch-image geometric distortion. The learned DSH
codes can effectively capture the cross-view similarities as well as the
intrinsic semantic correlations between different categories. To the best of
our knowledge, DSH is the first hashing work specifically designed for
category-level SBIR with an end-to-end deep architecture. The proposed DSH is
comprehensively evaluated on two large-scale datasets of TU-Berlin Extension
and Sketchy, and the experiments consistently show DSH's superior SBIR
accuracies over several state-of-the-art methods, while achieving significantly
reduced retrieval time and memory footprint.Comment: This paper will appear as a spotlight paper in CVPR201
Distributed Representation of Geometrically Correlated Images with Compressed Linear Measurements
This paper addresses the problem of distributed coding of images whose
correlation is driven by the motion of objects or positioning of the vision
sensors. It concentrates on the problem where images are encoded with
compressed linear measurements. We propose a geometry-based correlation model
in order to describe the common information in pairs of images. We assume that
the constitutive components of natural images can be captured by visual
features that undergo local transformations (e.g., translation) in different
images. We first identify prominent visual features by computing a sparse
approximation of a reference image with a dictionary of geometric basis
functions. We then pose a regularized optimization problem to estimate the
corresponding features in correlated images given by quantized linear
measurements. The estimated features have to comply with the compressed
information and to represent consistent transformation between images. The
correlation model is given by the relative geometric transformations between
corresponding features. We then propose an efficient joint decoding algorithm
that estimates the compressed images such that they stay consistent with both
the quantized measurements and the correlation model. Experimental results show
that the proposed algorithm effectively estimates the correlation between
images in multi-view datasets. In addition, the proposed algorithm provides
effective decoding performance that compares advantageously to independent
coding solutions as well as state-of-the-art distributed coding schemes based
on disparity learning
A location-aware embedding technique for accurate landmark recognition
The current state of the research in landmark recognition highlights the good
accuracy which can be achieved by embedding techniques, such as Fisher vector
and VLAD. All these techniques do not exploit spatial information, i.e.
consider all the features and the corresponding descriptors without embedding
their location in the image. This paper presents a new variant of the
well-known VLAD (Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors) embedding technique
which accounts, at a certain degree, for the location of features. The driving
motivation comes from the observation that, usually, the most interesting part
of an image (e.g., the landmark to be recognized) is almost at the center of
the image, while the features at the borders are irrelevant features which do
no depend on the landmark. The proposed variant, called locVLAD (location-aware
VLAD), computes the mean of the two global descriptors: the VLAD executed on
the entire original image, and the one computed on a cropped image which
removes a certain percentage of the image borders. This simple variant shows an
accuracy greater than the existing state-of-the-art approach. Experiments are
conducted on two public datasets (ZuBuD and Holidays) which are used both for
training and testing. Morever a more balanced version of ZuBuD is proposed.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, ICDSC 201
Image Reconstruction from Bag-of-Visual-Words
The objective of this work is to reconstruct an original image from
Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW). Image reconstruction from features can be a means
of identifying the characteristics of features. Additionally, it enables us to
generate novel images via features. Although BoVW is the de facto standard
feature for image recognition and retrieval, successful image reconstruction
from BoVW has not been reported yet. What complicates this task is that BoVW
lacks the spatial information for including visual words. As described in this
paper, to estimate an original arrangement, we propose an evaluation function
that incorporates the naturalness of local adjacency and the global position,
with a method to obtain related parameters using an external image database. To
evaluate the performance of our method, we reconstruct images of objects of 101
kinds. Additionally, we apply our method to analyze object classifiers and to
generate novel images via BoVW
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