19,909 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
A content-aware quantisation mechanism for transform domain distributed video coding
The discrete cosine transform (DCT) is widely applied in modern codecs to remove spatial redundancies, with the resulting DCT coefficients being quantised to achieve compression as well as bit-rate control. In distributed video coding (DVC) architectures like DISCOVER, DCT coefficient quantisation is traditionally performed using predetermined quantisation matrices (QM), which means the compression is heavily dependent on the sequence being coded. This makes bit-rate control challenging, with the situation exacerbated in the coding of high resolution sequences due to QM scarcity and the non-uniform bit-rate gaps between them. This paper introduces a novel content-aware quantisation (CAQ) mechanism to overcome the limitations of existing quantisation methods in transform domain DVC. CAQ creates a frame-specific QM to reduce quantisation errors by analysing the distribution of DCT coefficients. In contrast to the predetermined QM that is applicable to only 4x4 block sizes, CAQ produces QM for larger block sizes to enhance compression at higher resolutions. This provides superior bit-rate control and better output quality by seeking to fully exploit the available bandwidth, which is especially beneficial in bandwidth constrained scenarios. In addition, CAQ generates superior perceptual results by innovatively applying different weightings to the DCT coefficients to reflect the human visual system. Experimental results corroborate that CAQ both quantitatively and qualitatively provides enhanced output quality in bandwidth limited scenarios, by consistently utilising over 90% of available bandwidth
The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expressions.
Choosing appropriate referring expressions requires assessing whether a referent is āavailableā to the
addressee either perceptually or through discourse. In Study 1, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds,
but not 2-year-olds, chose different referring expressions (noun vs. pronoun) depending on whether
their addressee could see the intended referent or not. In Study 2, in more neutral discourse contexts
than previous studies, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds clearly differed in their use of referring
expressions according to whether their addressee had already mentioned a referent. Moreover, 2-yearolds
responded with more naming constructions when the referent had not been mentioned previously.
This suggests that, despite early socialācognitive developments, (a) it takes time tomaster the given/new
contrast linguistically, and (b) children understand the contrast earlier based on discourse, rather than
perceptual context
Manipulating Attributes of Natural Scenes via Hallucination
In this study, we explore building a two-stage framework for enabling users
to directly manipulate high-level attributes of a natural scene. The key to our
approach is a deep generative network which can hallucinate images of a scene
as if they were taken at a different season (e.g. during winter), weather
condition (e.g. in a cloudy day) or time of the day (e.g. at sunset). Once the
scene is hallucinated with the given attributes, the corresponding look is then
transferred to the input image while preserving the semantic details intact,
giving a photo-realistic manipulation result. As the proposed framework
hallucinates what the scene will look like, it does not require any reference
style image as commonly utilized in most of the appearance or style transfer
approaches. Moreover, it allows to simultaneously manipulate a given scene
according to a diverse set of transient attributes within a single model,
eliminating the need of training multiple networks per each translation task.
Our comprehensive set of qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the
effectiveness of our approach against the competing methods.Comment: Accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Graphic
- ā¦