A genomic catalog of Earth’s microbiomes

The reconstruction of bacterial and archaeal genomes from shotgun metagenomes has enabled insights into the ecology and evolution of environmental and host-associated microbiomes. Here we applied this approach to >10,000 metagenomes collected from diverse habitats covering all of Earth’s continents and oceans, including metagenomes from human and animal hosts, engineered environments, and natural and agricultural soils, to capture extant microbial, metabolic and functional potential. This comprehensive catalog includes 52,515 metagenome-assembled genomes representing 12,556 novel candidate species-level operational taxonomic units spanning 135 phyla. The catalog expands the known phylogenetic diversity of bacteria and archaea by 44% and is broadly available for streamlined comparative analyses, interactive exploration, metabolic modeling and bulk download. We demonstrate the utility of this collection for understanding secondary-metabolite biosynthetic potential and for resolving thousands of new host linkages to uncultivated viruses. This resource underscores the value of genome-centric approaches for revealing genomic properties of uncultivated microorganisms that affect ecosystem processes

A zerotree stereo video encoder

Over the past decade, the growing interests in realistic visual communication systems have lead to the rapid development of 3D visual compression techniques. A stereoscopic system is one way of stimulating 3D perception. Without exploiting the high redundancy in a stereo pair, the amount of data required to store or transmit it is doubled, when compared to the same in monocular images. In this paper, we present a new technique for coding stereo video sequences based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The proposed technique exploits Zerotree Entropy Coding (ZTE) that makes use of the wavelet block concept to achieve low bit rate stereo video coding. One of the two image streams, namely the main stream, is independently coded by a modified Zerotree video coder and the second stream, namely the auxiliary stream, is predicted based on disparity compensation. The residual image of auxiliary stream is then coded by a modified Zerotree video coder. Results show that the proposed encoder can achieve 50% bandwidth reduction compared to the ZTE based monoscopic compression encoder

Novel scanning order for improving the bit rate performance of ZTE video coding

Martucci's Zero-tree Entropy (ZTE) coding algorithm exploits the advantages of discrete wavelet coding to improve the video quality of inter-frame coding. In this algorithm the wavelet tree is coded into three different tables, type, valz and valnz. Subsequently these three tables are arithmetic coded. However, the statistical variation of the distribution of the values and types are not considered in this categorization. We propose to decompose the zerotree such that this variation is taken into account. In our representation, values and the types are reorganized into hierarchical structures according to the sub band and the orientation. Our test results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the bit rate per frame up to 73% over the Martucci's algorithm and performs better than EBCOT at higher bit rates

Novel scanning order for improving the bit rate performance of ZTE video coding

Martucci's Zero-tree Entropy (ZTE) coding algorithm exploits the advantages of discrete wavelet coding to improve the video quality of inter-frame coding. In this algorithm the wavelet tree is coded into three different tables, type, valz and valnz. Subsequently these three tables are arithmetic coded. However, the statistical variation of the distribution of the values and types are not considered in this categorization. We propose to decompose the zerotree such that this variation is taken into account. In our representation, values and the types are reorganized into hierarchical structures according to the sub band and the orientation. Our test results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the bit rate per frame up to 73% over the Martucci's algorithm and performs better than EBCOT at higher bit rates

Table tennis and computer vision: A monocular event classifier

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Detecting events in table tennis using monocular video sequences for match-play officiating is challenging. Here a low-cost monocular video installation generates image sequences and, using the Horn-Schunck Optical Flow algorithm, ball detection and location processing captures sudden changes in the ball’s motion. It is demonstrated that each abrupt change corresponds to a distinct event pattern described by its combined velocity, acceleration and bearing. Component motion threshold values are determined from the analysis of a range of table tennis event video sequences. The novel event classifier reviews change in motion data against these thresholds, for use in a rules based officiating decision support system. Experimental results using this method demonstrate an event classification success rate of 95.9%