Complexity of Saliency-Cognizant Error Concealment Based on the Itti-Koch-Niebur Saliency Model

In this technical report, we analyze the computational complexity of the saliency-cognizant error concealment method for video streaming proposed in [1]. We derive an approximate number of operations needed to reconstruct a missing block in a video frame as a function of the block size and frame resolution

Visual Saliency in Video Compression and Transmission

This dissertation explores the concept of visual saliency—a measure of propensity for drawing visual attention—and presents various novel methods for utilization of visual saliencyin video compression and transmission. Specifically, a computationally-efficient method for visual saliency estimation in digital images and videos is developed, which approximates one of the most well-known visual saliency models. In the context of video compression, a saliency-aware video coding method is proposed within a region-of-interest (ROI) video coding paradigm. The proposed video coding method attempts to reduce attention-grabbing coding artifacts and keep viewers’ attention in areas where the quality is highest. The method allows visual saliency to increase in high quality parts of the frame, and allows saliency to reduce in non-ROI parts. Using this approach, the proposed method is able to achieve the same subjective quality as competing state-of-the-art methods at a lower bit rate. In the context of video transmission, a novel saliency-cognizant error concealment method is presented for ROI-based video streaming in which regions with higher visual saliency are protected more heavily than low saliency regions. In the proposed error concealment method, a low-saliency prior is added to the error concealment process as a regularization term, which serves two purposes. First, it provides additional side information for the decoder to identify the correct replacement blocks for concealment. Second, in the event that a perfectly matched block cannot be unambiguously identified, the low-saliency prior reduces viewers’ visual attention on the loss-stricken regions, resulting in higher overall subjective quality. During the course of this research, an eye-tracking dataset for several standard video sequences was created and made publicly available. This dataset can be utilized to test saliency models for video and evaluate various perceptually-motivated algorithms for video processing and video quality assessment

Saliency-Cognizant Error Concealment in Loss-Corrupted Streaming Video

Error concealment in packet-loss-corrupted streaming video is in-herently an under-determined problem, as there are insufficient num-ber of well-defined criteria to recover the missing blocks perfectly. When a Region-of-Interest (ROI) based unequal error protection (UEP) scheme is deployed during video streaming—i.e., more vi-sually salient regions are strongly protected—a lost block is likely to be of low saliency in the original frame. In this paper, we propose to add a low-saliency prior to the error concealment problem as a reg-ularization term. It serves two purposes. First, in ROI-based UEP video streaming, low-saliency prior provides the right side informa-tion for the client to identify the correct replacement blocks for con-cealment. Second, in the event that a perfectly matched block cannot be unambiguously identified, the low-saliency prior reduces viewer’s visual attention on the loss-stricken region, resulting in higher over-all subjective quality. We study the effectiveness of a low-saliency prior in the con-text of a previously proposed RECAP [1] error concealment system. RECAP transmits a low-resolution (LR) version of an image along-side the original high-resolution (HR) version, so that if blocks in the HR version are lost, the correctly-received LR version can serve as a template for matching of suitable replacement blocks from a previ-ously correctly-decoded HR frame. We add a low-saliency prior to the block identification process, so that only replacement candidate blocks with good match and low saliency can be selected. Further, we design and apply four saliency reduction operators iteratively in a loop, in order to reduce the saliency of candidate blocks. Exper-imental results show that: i) PSNR of the error-concealed frames can be increased dramatically (up to 3.2dB over the original RE-CAP), showing the effectiveness of a low-saliency prior in the under-determined error concealment problem; and ii) subjective quality of the repaired video using our proposal, as confirmed by an extensive user study, is better than the original RECAP. Index Terms — Video streaming, error concealment, visual saliency 1

Big Data Security (Volume 3)

After a short description of the key concepts of big data the book explores on the secrecy and security threats posed especially by cloud based data storage. It delivers conceptual frameworks and models along with case studies of recent technology

TextFrame: Cosmopolitanism and Non-Exclusively Anglophone Poetries

This project proposes a replacement for some institutional-archival mechanisms of non-exclusively anglophone poetry as it is produced under racial capitalism and archived via its universities and grant-bearing nonprofits. The project argues specifically for the self-archiving of non-exclusively anglophone poetry, and by extension of poetry, in a manner that builds away from US-dominated, nationally-organized institutions. It argues that cosmopolitanist norm translation, as advocated by various critics, can function as part of a critique of institutional value creation used in maintaining inequalities through poetry. The US-based Poetry Foundation is currently the major online archive of contemporary anglophone poetry; the project comprises a series of related essays that culminate in a rough outline for a collaboratively designed, coded, and maintained application to replace the Foundation’s website. Whatever benefit might result, replacing archival mechanisms of racial capitalism while remaining within its systemic modes of value creation is at best a form of substitution: it is not an actual change in relations and not a transition to anything. Doing so may, however, allow greater clarity in understanding how poetry is situated within US-based institutions, beyond the images and values that poets and critics in the US often help to maintain. Chapter one, “‘Indianness’ and Omission: 60 Indian Poets,” reads the anthology 60 Indian Poets, published in 2008 in India and the UK (with US distribution), as argument about the contours of Indian Poetry in English and about the contours of India’s relations in the world. It relates Rashmi Sadana’s work on the meanings of English in India to decisions made within the anthology, and look further at Pollock’s conception of cosmopolitanism and vernacularity, particular as it applies to the Indian North-East and the poetry of Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih. The second chapter, “Archival Power: Individualization, the Racial State, and Institutional Poetry” engages Roderick Ferguson’s concept of archival power to explain the 2015 “crisis” within contemporary US poetry driven by practitioners of conceptual poetry, and an attempted archival act with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement. The chapter ends with a fragment of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s recent account of US university life as experienced by Black artists and scholars. That chapter is followed by “The Poetry Foundation as Site of Archival Power,” which extends Jodi Melamed’s critique of US university value-creation mechanisms to Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation’s website. It argues that the Poetry Foundation functions as a de facto arm of the US university system as outlined in the previous chapter, and aids in capitalist value-creation. “TextFrame: An Open Archive for Poetry,” the fourth chapter, is an attempt to begin thinking a replacement for current mechanisms of archiving non-exclusively anglophone poetry. The fifth chapter, “Narayanan’s Language Events as Free-Tier Application,” documents work imagined for TextFrame, as an application, that has actually already been built: the poet and scholar Vivek Narayanan adapted Robert Desnos’s Language Events for the classroom using a variety of discrete free services, and the present author collaborated with Narayanan in creating a stand-alone Web application. Chapters six, seven, and eight function as case studies to be used in creating templates for providing context to specific poems within any built application. Both of the specific moments covered transmogrify the “anti-psychological.” The sixth chapter, “An Unendurable Age: Ashbery, O’Hara, and 1950s Precursors of ‘Self’ Psychology” thus argues that an anti-psychological ethos is developed in Ashbery and O’Hara’s poems of that moment. It shows that Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” (1959) is almost certainly a parody of Gordon Allport’s theory of Personalism, of related strands of 1950s American psychology, and of the poetry that developed alongside them in the 1930s. It follows other critics in looking at midcentury conceptions of schizophrenia as a specifically homosexual disease, and argues for the importance of contemporarily published examples of schizophrenic discourse, particularly those of Harry Stack Sullivan. It argues that Ashbery’s poem “A Boy” can be read as directly engaging those ideas, and opposing them. The shorter discussions follow consider the affinities that Some Trees has with anti- or a-psychological theories of mind that were being developed at Harvard and MIT at the time that Ashbery and O’Hara were in Cambridge, including generative grammar and critiques of philosophical analyticity. The eighth chapter, “Before Conceptualism: Disgust and Over-determination in White-dominated Experimental Poetry in New York, 1999-2003,” highlights Dan Farrell and Lytle Shaw’s very different uses of lyric’s peculiar staging of voice to foreground the multi-furcation of white identities and voice in response to state pressures. The last two chapters take up two corollaries, or theoretical concerns that fell out trying to think a cosmopolitanist application. The first, “Why Not Reddit?” examines existing commercial cosmopolitanist solutions for some of the functionality proposed for the application, and reasons for rejecting them. In doing so, it discusses Thomas Farrell’s construct of “rhetorical culture” in detail, and traces a theory of communication and authorship within a community, particularly with regard to thinking history. The last chapter (and second corollary) is titled “Ethos in Pedagogy as a Limit on Norm Translation.” It establishes the Aristotelian concept of ethos as a pedagogical limit for norm translation. The study’s governing interest is not the conflicts or differences between practitioners or tendencies that are detailed here, but their relative incomprehensibility of those differences outside of their formative contexts

From Spectrum to Beam in Iraq Organizational Adaptation: Combat, Stability, and Beyond

On 20 March 2003, the United States Army participated in the invasion of Iraq as part of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF). Despite the announcement from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln of the end of major combat operations on 1 May 2003, the U.S. Army is still conducting maneuvers and missions throughout the cities and desert plains of Iraq. Fundamentally, the U.S. Army was incapable of translating initial combat success into the accomplishment of strategic objectives and political victory. What emerged from tactical and operational victories against Iraqi forces was not a stable democratic peace; instead, Iraq plunged into a long and complex insurgency that fused the spectrum of conflict into a single beam where the full range of military operations had to be performed nearly simultaneously.Combating and defeating this insurgency required a capacity for conducting simultaneous full spectrum operations in a competitive environment populated by highly adaptive foes. But the U.S. Army was unprepared for this task. A Cycle of Mutual Adaptation between hierarchical and vertically integrated organizations and networked and horizontally integrated competitors ensued. The latter was predisposed to organizational adaptation and conducting networked operations in a decentralized fashion; the former was predisposed to quickly vanquishing threats along prescriptive plans with centralized command and control systems. How this competition unfolded and the implications of this process are the subject of this study.Although the insurgency in Iraq has largely been quelled, the cyclical and competitive process producing this tenuous stability has raised serious questions regarding the efficacy of post-Cold War and post-9/11 strategies, force structures, doctrine, training, and the U.S. Army's organizational capacity for adaptation in light of national interests, strategic requirements, and institutional legacies. This study charts the historical factors contributing to the Cycle of Mutual Adaptation in OIF, analyzes this cycle, gives an assessment of the international security environment in the wake of this conflict, and concludes with policy recommendations for improving the U.S. Army's capacity for organizational adaptation in the 21st Century

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed