Dense light field coding: a survey

Light Field (LF) imaging is a promising solution for providing more immersive and closer to reality multimedia experiences to end-users with unprecedented creative freedom and flexibility for applications in different areas, such as virtual and augmented reality. Due to the recent technological advances in optics, sensor manufacturing and available transmission bandwidth, as well as the investment of many tech giants in this area, it is expected that soon many LF transmission systems will be available to both consumers and professionals. Recognizing this, novel standardization initiatives have recently emerged in both the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), triggering the discussion on the deployment of LF coding solutions to efficiently handle the massive amount of data involved in such systems. Since then, the topic of LF content coding has become a booming research area, attracting the attention of many researchers worldwide. In this context, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of the most relevant LF coding solutions proposed in the literature, focusing on angularly dense LFs. Special attention is placed on a thorough description of the different LF coding methods and on the main concepts related to this relevant area. Moreover, comprehensive insights are presented into open research challenges and future research directions for LF coding.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Towards visualization and searching :a dual-purpose video coding approach

In modern video applications, the role of the decoded video is much more than filling a screen for visualization. To offer powerful video-enabled applications, it is increasingly critical not only to visualize the decoded video but also to provide efficient searching capabilities for similar content. Video surveillance and personal communication applications are critical examples of these dual visualization and searching requirements. However, current video coding solutions are strongly biased towards the visualization needs. In this context, the goal of this work is to propose a dual-purpose video coding solution targeting both visualization and searching needs by adopting a hybrid coding framework where the usual pixel-based coding approach is combined with a novel feature-based coding approach. In this novel dual-purpose video coding solution, some frames are coded using a set of keypoint matches, which not only allow decoding for visualization, but also provide the decoder valuable feature-related information, extracted at the encoder from the original frames, instrumental for efficient searching. The proposed solution is based on a flexible joint Lagrangian optimization framework where pixel-based and feature-based processing are combined to find the most appropriate trade-off between the visualization and searching performances. Extensive experimental results for the assessment of the proposed dual-purpose video coding solution under meaningful test conditions are presented. The results show the flexibility of the proposed coding solution to achieve different optimization trade-offs, notably competitive performance regarding the state-of-the-art HEVC standard both in terms of visualization and searching performance.Em modernas aplicações de vídeo, o papel do vídeo decodificado é muito mais que simplesmente preencher uma tela para visualização. Para oferecer aplicações mais poderosas por meio de sinais de vídeo,é cada vez mais crítico não apenas considerar a qualidade do conteúdo objetivando sua visualização, mas também possibilitar meios de realizar busca por conteúdos semelhantes. Requisitos de visualização e de busca são considerados, por exemplo, em modernas aplicações de vídeo vigilância e comunicações pessoais. No entanto, as atuais soluções de codificação de vídeo são fortemente voltadas aos requisitos de visualização. Nesse contexto, o objetivo deste trabalho é propor uma solução de codificação de vídeo de propósito duplo, objetivando tanto requisitos de visualização quanto de busca. Para isso, é proposto um arcabouço de codificação em que a abordagem usual de codificação de pixels é combinada com uma nova abordagem de codificação baseada em features visuais. Nessa solução, alguns quadros são codificados usando um conjunto de pares de keypoints casados, possibilitando não apenas visualização, mas também provendo ao decodificador valiosas informações de features visuais, extraídas no codificador a partir do conteúdo original, que são instrumentais em aplicações de busca. A solução proposta emprega um esquema flexível de otimização Lagrangiana onde o processamento baseado em pixel é combinado com o processamento baseado em features visuais objetivando encontrar um compromisso adequado entre os desempenhos de visualização e de busca. Os resultados experimentais mostram a flexibilidade da solução proposta em alcançar diferentes compromissos de otimização, nomeadamente desempenho competitivo em relação ao padrão HEVC tanto em termos de visualização quanto de busca

Analysis of affine motion-compensated prediction and its application in aerial video coding

Motion-compensated prediction is used in video coding standards like High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) as one key element of data compression. Commonly, a purely translational motion model is employed. In order to also cover non-translational motion types like rotation or scaling (zoom) contained in aerial video sequences such as captured from unmanned aerial vehicles, an affine motion model can be applied. In this work, a model for affine motion-compensated prediction in video coding is derived by extending a model of purely translational motion-compensated prediction. Using the rate-distortion theory and the displacement estimation error caused by inaccurate affine motion parameter estimation, the minimum required bit rate for encoding the prediction error is determined. In this model, the affine transformation parameters are assumed to be affected by statistically independent estimation errors, which all follow a zero-mean Gaussian distributed probability density function (pdf). The joint pdf of the estimation errors is derived and transformed into the pdf of the location-dependent displacement estimation error in the image. The latter is related to the minimum required bit rate for encoding the prediction error. Similar to the derivations of the fully affine motion model, a four-parameter simplified affine model is investigated. It is of particular interest since such a model is considered for the upcoming video coding standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC) succeeding HEVC. As the simplified affine motion model is able to describe most motions contained in aerial surveillance videos, its application in video coding is justified. Both models provide valuable information about the minimum bit rate for encoding the prediction error as a function of affine estimation accuracies. Although the bit rate in motion-compensated prediction can be considerably reduced by using a motion model which is able to describe motion types occurring in the scene, the total video bit rate may remain quite high, depending on the motion estimation accuracy. Thus, at the example of aerial surveillance sequences, a codec independent region of interest- ( ROI -) based aerial video coding system is proposed that exploits the characteristic of such sequences. Assuming the captured scene to be planar, one frame can be projected into another using global motion compensation. Consequently, only new emerging areas have to be encoded. At the decoder, all new areas are registered into a so-called mosaic. From this, reconstructed frames are extracted and concatenated as a video sequence. To also preserve moving objects in the reconstructed video, local motion is detected and encoded in addition to the new areas. The proposed general ROI coding system was evaluated for very low and low bit rates between 100 and 5000 kbit/s for aerial sequences of HD resolution. It is able to reduce the bit rate by 90% compared to common HEVC coding of similar quality. Subjective tests confirm that the overall image quality of the ROI coding system exceeds that of a common HEVC encoder especially at very low bit rates below 1 Mbit/s. To prevent discontinuities introduced by inaccurate global motion estimation, as may be caused by radial lens distortion, a fully automatic in-loop radial distortion compensation is proposed. For this purpose, an unknown radial distortion compensation parameter that is constant for a group of frames is jointly estimated with the global motion. This parameter is optimized to minimize the distortions of the projections of frames in the mosaic. By this approach, the global motion compensation was improved by 0.27dB and discontinuities in the frames extracted from the mosaic are diminished. As an additional benefit, the generation of long-term mosaics becomes possible, constructed by more than 1500 aerial frames with unknown radial lens distortion and without any calibration or manual lens distortion compensation.Bewegungskompensierte Prädiktion wird in Videocodierstandards wie High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) als ein Schlüsselelement zur Datenkompression verwendet. Typischerweise kommt dabei ein rein translatorisches Bewegungsmodell zum Einsatz. Um auch nicht-translatorische Bewegungen wie Rotation oder Skalierung (Zoom) beschreiben zu können, welche beispielsweise in von unbemannten Luftfahrzeugen aufgezeichneten Luftbildvideosequenzen enthalten sind, kann ein affines Bewegungsmodell verwendet werden. In dieser Arbeit wird aufbauend auf einem rein translatorischen Bewegungsmodell ein Modell für affine bewegungskompensierte Prädiktion hergeleitet. Unter Verwendung der Raten-Verzerrungs-Theorie und des Verschiebungsschätzfehlers, welcher aus einer inexakten affinen Bewegungsschätzung resultiert, wird die minimal erforderliche Bitrate zur Codierung des Prädiktionsfehlers hergeleitet. Für die Modellierung wird angenommen, dass die sechs Parameter einer affinen Transformation durch statistisch unabhängige Schätzfehler gestört sind. Für jeden dieser Schätzfehler wird angenommen, dass die Wahrscheinlichkeitsdichteverteilung einer mittelwertfreien Gaußverteilung entspricht. Aus der Verbundwahrscheinlichkeitsdichte der Schätzfehler wird die Wahrscheinlichkeitsdichte des ortsabhängigen Verschiebungsschätzfehlers im Bild berechnet. Letztere wird schließlich zu der minimalen Bitrate in Beziehung gesetzt, welche für die Codierung des Prädiktionsfehlers benötigt wird. Analog zur obigen Ableitung des Modells für das voll-affine Bewegungsmodell wird ein vereinfachtes affines Bewegungsmodell mit vier Freiheitsgraden untersucht. Ein solches Modell wird derzeit auch im Rahmen der Standardisierung des HEVC-Nachfolgestandards Versatile Video Coding (VVC) evaluiert. Da das vereinfachte Modell bereits die meisten in Luftbildvideosequenzen vorkommenden Bewegungen abbilden kann, ist der Einsatz des vereinfachten affinen Modells in der Videocodierung gerechtfertigt. Beide Modelle liefern wertvolle Informationen über die minimal benötigte Bitrate zur Codierung des Prädiktionsfehlers in Abhängigkeit von der affinen Schätzgenauigkeit. Zwar kann die Bitrate mittels bewegungskompensierter Prädiktion durch Wahl eines geeigneten Bewegungsmodells und akkurater affiner Bewegungsschätzung stark reduziert werden, die verbleibende Gesamtbitrate kann allerdings dennoch relativ hoch sein. Deshalb wird am Beispiel von Luftbildvideosequenzen ein Regionen-von-Interesse- (ROI-) basiertes Codiersystem vorgeschlagen, welches spezielle Eigenschaften solcher Sequenzen ausnutzt. Unter der Annahme, dass eine aufgenommene Szene planar ist, kann ein Bild durch globale Bewegungskompensation in ein anderes projiziert werden. Deshalb müssen vom aktuellen Bild prinzipiell nur noch neu im Bild erscheinende Bereiche codiert werden. Am Decoder werden alle neuen Bildbereiche in einem gemeinsamen Mosaikbild registriert, aus dem schließlich die Einzelbilder der Videosequenz rekonstruiert werden können. Um auch lokale Bewegungen abzubilden, werden bewegte Objekte detektiert und zusätzlich zu neuen Bildbereichen als ROI codiert. Die Leistungsfähigkeit des ROI-Codiersystems wurde insbesondere für sehr niedrige und niedrige Bitraten von 100 bis 5000 kbit/s für Bilder in HD-Auflösung evaluiert. Im Vergleich zu einer gewöhnlichen HEVC-Codierung kann die Bitrate um 90% reduziert werden. Durch subjektive Tests wurde bestätigt, dass das ROI-Codiersystem insbesondere für sehr niedrige Bitraten von unter 1 Mbit/s deutlich leistungsfähiger in Bezug auf Detailauflösung und Gesamteindruck ist als ein herkömmliches HEVC-Referenzsystem. Um Diskontinuitäten in den rekonstruierten Videobildern zu vermeiden, die durch eine durch Linsenverzeichnungen induzierte ungenaue globale Bewegungsschätzung entstehen können, wird eine automatische Radialverzeichnungskorrektur vorgeschlagen. Dabei wird ein unbekannter, jedoch über mehrere Bilder konstanter Korrekturparameter gemeinsam mit der globalen Bewegung geschätzt. Dieser Parameter wird derart optimiert, dass die Projektionen der Bilder in das Mosaik möglichst wenig verzerrt werden. Daraus resultiert eine um 0,27dB verbesserte globale Bewegungskompensation, wodurch weniger Diskontinuitäten in den aus dem Mosaik rekonstruierten Bildern entstehen. Dieses Verfahren ermöglicht zusätzlich die Erstellung von Langzeitmosaiken aus über 1500 Luftbildern mit unbekannter Radialverzeichnung und ohne manuelle Korrektur

A comprehensive video codec comparison

In this paper, we compare the video codecs AV1 (version 1.0.0-2242 from August 2019), HEVC (HM and x265), AVC (x264), the exploration software JEM which is based on HEVC, and the VVC (successor of HEVC) test model VTM (version 4.0 from February 2019) under two fair and balanced configurations: All Intra for the assessment of intra coding and Maximum Coding Efficiency with all codecs being tuned for their best coding efficiency settings. VTM achieves the highest coding efficiency in both configurations, followed by JEM and AV1. The worst coding efficiency is achieved by x264 and x265, even in the placebo preset for highest coding efficiency. AV1 gained a lot in terms of coding efficiency compared to previous versions and now outperforms HM by 24% BD-Rate gains. VTM gains 5% over AV1 in terms of BD-Rates. By reporting separate numbers for JVET and AOM test sequences, it is ensured that no bias in the test sequences exists. When comparing only intra coding tools, it is observed that the complexity increases exponentially for linearly increasing coding efficiency

Joint exploration model based light field image coding: A comparative study

© 2017 IEEE. The recent light field imaging technology has been attracting a lot of interests due to its potential applications in a large number of areas including Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality (VR/AR), Teleconferencing, and E-learning. Light Field (LF) data is able to provide rich visual information such as scene rendering with changes in depth of field, viewpoint, and focal length. However, Light Field data usually associates to a critical problem - the massive data. Therefore, compressing LF data is one of the main challenges in LF research. In this context, we present in this paper a comparative study for compressing LF data with not only the widely used image/video coding standards, such as JPEG-2000, H.264/AVC, HEVC and Google/VP9 but also with the most recent image/video coding solution, the Joint Exploration Model. In addition, this paper also proposes a LF image coding flow, which can be used as a benchmark for future LF compression evaluation. Finally, the compression efficiency of these coding solutions is thoroughly compared throughout a rich set of test conditions

Color space adaptation for video coding

Processament d'imatges abans de ser codificades pel codificador HEVC amb la finalitat d'augmentar la qualitat i la fidelitat.[ANGLÈS] Project on the objective and subjective improvements by pre-processing images to be encoded into a video.[CASTELLÀ] Proyecto sobre la repercusión en la mejora de calidad objetiva y subjetiva del pre-procesado de imágenes a codificar con vídeo.[CATALÀ] Projecte sobre la repercussió en la millora de la qualitat objectiva i subjectiva del pre-processament d'imatges a codificar amb vídeo

Disparity compensation using geometric transforms

This dissertation describes the research and development of some techniques to enhance the disparity compensation in 3D video compression algorithms. Disparity compensation is usually performed using a block matching technique between views, disregarding the various levels of disparity present for objects at different depths in the scene. An alternative coding scheme is proposed, taking advantage of the cameras setup information and the object’s depth in the scene, to compensate more complex spatial distortions, being able to improve disparity compensation even with convergent cameras. In order to perform a more accurate disparity compensation, the reference picture list is enriched with additional geometrically transformed images, for the most relevant object’s levels of depth in the scene, resulting from projections of one view to another. This scheme can be implemented in any state-of-the-art video codec, as H.264/AVC or HEVC, in order to improve the disparity matching accuracy between views. Experimental results, using MV-HEVC extension, show the efficiency of the proposed method for coding stereo video, presenting bitrate savings up to 2.87%, for convergent camera sequences, and 1.52% for parallel camera sequences. Also a method to choose the geometrically transformed inter view reference pictures was developed, in order to reduce unnecessary overhead for unused reference pictures. By selecting and adding to the reference picture list, only the most useful pictures, all results improved, presenting bitrate savings up to 3.06% for convergent camera sequences, and 2% for parallel camera sequences

Transformées basées graphes pour la compression de nouvelles modalités d’image

Due to the large availability of new camera types capturing extra geometrical information, as well as the emergence of new image modalities such as light fields and omni-directional images, a huge amount of high dimensional data has to be stored and delivered. The ever growing streaming and storage requirements of these new image modalities require novel image coding tools that exploit the complex structure of those data. This thesis aims at exploring novel graph based approaches for adapting traditional image transform coding techniques to the emerging data types where the sampled information are lying on irregular structures. In a first contribution, novel local graph based transforms are designed for light field compact representations. By leveraging a careful design of local transform supports and a local basis functions optimization procedure, significant improvements in terms of energy compaction can be obtained. Nevertheless, the locality of the supports did not permit to exploit long term dependencies of the signal. This led to a second contribution where different sampling strategies are investigated. Coupled with novel prediction methods, they led to very prominent results for quasi-lossless compression of light fields. The third part of the thesis focuses on the definition of rate-distortion optimized sub-graphs for the coding of omni-directional content. If we move further and give more degree of freedom to the graphs we wish to use, we can learn or define a model (set of weights on the edges) that might not be entirely reliable for transform design. The last part of the thesis is dedicated to theoretically analyze the effect of the uncertainty on the efficiency of the graph transforms.En raison de la grande disponibilité de nouveaux types de caméras capturant des informations géométriques supplémentaires, ainsi que de l'émergence de nouvelles modalités d'image telles que les champs de lumière et les images omnidirectionnelles, il est nécessaire de stocker et de diffuser une quantité énorme de hautes dimensions. Les exigences croissantes en matière de streaming et de stockage de ces nouvelles modalités d’image nécessitent de nouveaux outils de codage d’images exploitant la structure complexe de ces données. Cette thèse a pour but d'explorer de nouvelles approches basées sur les graphes pour adapter les techniques de codage de transformées d'image aux types de données émergents où les informations échantillonnées reposent sur des structures irrégulières. Dans une première contribution, de nouvelles transformées basées sur des graphes locaux sont conçues pour des représentations compactes des champs de lumière. En tirant parti d’une conception minutieuse des supports de transformées locaux et d’une procédure d’optimisation locale des fonctions de base , il est possible d’améliorer considérablement le compaction d'énergie. Néanmoins, la localisation des supports ne permettait pas d'exploiter les dépendances à long terme du signal. Cela a conduit à une deuxième contribution où différentes stratégies d'échantillonnage sont étudiées. Couplés à de nouvelles méthodes de prédiction, ils ont conduit à des résultats très importants en ce qui concerne la compression quasi sans perte de champs de lumière statiques. La troisième partie de la thèse porte sur la définition de sous-graphes optimisés en distorsion de débit pour le codage de contenu omnidirectionnel. Si nous allons plus loin et donnons plus de liberté aux graphes que nous souhaitons utiliser, nous pouvons apprendre ou définir un modèle (ensemble de poids sur les arêtes) qui pourrait ne pas être entièrement fiable pour la conception de transformées. La dernière partie de la thèse est consacrée à l'analyse théorique de l'effet de l'incertitude sur l'efficacité des transformées basées graphes