36 research outputs found
PEA265: Perceptual Assessment of Video Compression Artifacts
The most widely used video encoders share a common hybrid coding framework
that includes block-based motion estimation/compensation and block-based
transform coding. Despite their high coding efficiency, the encoded videos
often exhibit visually annoying artifacts, denoted as Perceivable Encoding
Artifacts (PEAs), which significantly degrade the visual Qualityof- Experience
(QoE) of end users. To monitor and improve visual QoE, it is crucial to develop
subjective and objective measures that can identify and quantify various types
of PEAs. In this work, we make the first attempt to build a large-scale
subjectlabelled database composed of H.265/HEVC compressed videos containing
various PEAs. The database, namely the PEA265 database, includes 4 types of
spatial PEAs (i.e. blurring, blocking, ringing and color bleeding) and 2 types
of temporal PEAs (i.e. flickering and floating). Each containing at least
60,000 image or video patches with positive and negative labels. To objectively
identify these PEAs, we train Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) using the
PEA265 database. It appears that state-of-theart ResNeXt is capable of
identifying each type of PEAs with high accuracy. Furthermore, we define PEA
pattern and PEA intensity measures to quantify PEA levels of compressed video
sequence. We believe that the PEA265 database and our findings will benefit the
future development of video quality assessment methods and perceptually
motivated video encoders.Comment: 10 pages,15 figures,4 table
RLFC: Random Access Light Field Compression using Key Views and Bounded Integer Encoding
We present a new hierarchical compression scheme for encoding light field
images (LFI) that is suitable for interactive rendering. Our method (RLFC)
exploits redundancies in the light field images by constructing a tree
structure. The top level (root) of the tree captures the common high-level
details across the LFI, and other levels (children) of the tree capture
specific low-level details of the LFI. Our decompressing algorithm corresponds
to tree traversal operations and gathers the values stored at different levels
of the tree. Furthermore, we use bounded integer sequence encoding which
provides random access and fast hardware decoding for compressing the blocks of
children of the tree. We have evaluated our method for 4D two-plane
parameterized light fields. The compression rates vary from 0.08 - 2.5 bits per
pixel (bpp), resulting in compression ratios of around 200:1 to 20:1 for a PSNR
quality of 40 to 50 dB. The decompression times for decoding the blocks of LFI
are 1 - 3 microseconds per channel on an NVIDIA GTX-960 and we can render new
views with a resolution of 512X512 at 200 fps. Our overall scheme is simple to
implement and involves only bit manipulations and integer arithmetic
operations.Comment: Accepted for publication at Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and
Games (I3D '19
Video Classification With CNNs: Using The Codec As A Spatio-Temporal Activity Sensor
We investigate video classification via a two-stream convolutional neural
network (CNN) design that directly ingests information extracted from
compressed video bitstreams. Our approach begins with the observation that all
modern video codecs divide the input frames into macroblocks (MBs). We
demonstrate that selective access to MB motion vector (MV) information within
compressed video bitstreams can also provide for selective, motion-adaptive, MB
pixel decoding (a.k.a., MB texture decoding). This in turn allows for the
derivation of spatio-temporal video activity regions at extremely high speed in
comparison to conventional full-frame decoding followed by optical flow
estimation. In order to evaluate the accuracy of a video classification
framework based on such activity data, we independently train two CNN
architectures on MB texture and MV correspondences and then fuse their scores
to derive the final classification of each test video. Evaluation on two
standard datasets shows that the proposed approach is competitive to the best
two-stream video classification approaches found in the literature. At the same
time: (i) a CPU-based realization of our MV extraction is over 977 times faster
than GPU-based optical flow methods; (ii) selective decoding is up to 12 times
faster than full-frame decoding; (iii) our proposed spatial and temporal CNNs
perform inference at 5 to 49 times lower cloud computing cost than the fastest
methods from the literature.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video
Technology. Extension of ICIP 2017 conference pape