31880885
Channel-adaptive error protection for streaming stored MPEG-4 FGS over error-prone environments
In this paper, we investigate an adaptive channel error-protection scheme for streaming stored MPEG-4 fine granular scalability (FGS) bitstreams over error-prone environments. The human eye is sensitive to the variations in reconstructed image quality. Therefore, instead of using only the minimal average frame distortion as the optimization criterion, we propose a rate-distortion (R-D)-based bit-allocation method to determine the source coding rate and the channel coding rate under a given channel condition so as to minimize both the average image distortion and quality variation. Based on our proposed piecewise model of the MPEG-4 FGS enhancement layer, a balance between the average frame quality and quality variation will be obtained. Experimental results show that, compared with other existing methods, our proposed method can achieve less quality variation and comparable average frame distortion under various channel conditions.
28287084
Human face recognition based on spatially weighted Hausdorff distance
The edge map of a facial image contains abundant information about its shape and structure, which is useful for face recognition. To compare edge images, Hausdorff distance is an efficient measure that can determine the degree of their resemblance, and does not require a knowledge of correspondence among those points in the two edge maps. In this paper, a new modified Hansdorff distance measure is proposed, which has a better discriminant power. As different facial regions have different degrees of significance for face recognition, a new modified Hausdorff distance is proposed which is weighted according to a weighted function derived from the spatial information of the human face; hence crucial regions are emphasized for face identification. Experimental results show that the distance measure can achieve recognition rates of 80%, 87%, and 91% for the first, the first five, and the first seven likely matched faces, respectively.
26133489
Robust Hausdorff distance for shape matching
The Hausdorff distance can be used to measure the similarity of two point sets. In matching the two point sets, one of them is translated, rotated and scaled in order to obtain an optimal matching, which is a computationally intensive process. In this paper, a robust line-feature-based approach for model-based recognition is presented, which can achieve good matching, even in a noisy environment or with the existence of occlusion. We propose three different ways for forming the line segments for a point set. Two of the methods are based on a fixed reference point, which are the centroid and the center of the minimal disk of the point set. The third method is based on the longest possible line segments formed within the point set. The line features extracted based on the respective line segments are insensitive to noise and can be used to determine the rotation and scale of the image point set accurately and reliably, and more importantly, 2D-2D matching algorithm can be adopted. The first 2D-matching is to compute the relative scale and orientation between the two point sets. Having rotated and scaled the image point set, the M-Estimation Hausdorff distance is applied for the second 2D-matching to measure the relative translation between the query point set and the model point set. This 2D-2D matching can greatly reduce the required memory and computation when compared to a 4D-matching. Both the performance and the sensitivity to noise of our algorithms are evaluated using simulated data. Experiments show that our 2D-2D algorithms can yield a high level of performance when determining the scale, the orientation and the similarity of two point sets.
5893059
Hybrid Chinese/English text detection in images and video frames
We propose a multiscale texture-based method using local energy analysis for hybrid Chinese/English text detection in images and video frames. Local energy analysis has been shown to work well in text detection, where remarkable local energy variations of pixels correspond to text region or boundary of other objects and lower local energy variations of pixels correspond to background or the interior of non-text objects. Local energy variation is calculated in a local region based on the wavelet transform coefficients of images. Hybrid Chinese/English text in images and video frames can be detected whether it is aligned horizontally or vertically. The font size of text to be detected may vary in a wide range of values. The proposed method has been tested on 321 frame images obtained from local TV programs and a tested dataset with low missed rate and false alarm rate.
721061
A fast fractal image coding based on kick-out and zero contrast conditions
A fast algorithm for fractal image coding based on a single kick-out condition and the zero contrast prediction is proposed in this paper. The single kick-out condition can avoid a large number of range-domain block matches when finding the best matched domain block. An efficient method for zero contrast prediction is also proposed, which can determine whether the contrast factor for a domain block is zero or not, and compute the corresponding difference between the range block and the transformed domain block efficiently and exactly. The proposed algorithm can achieve the same reconstructed image quality as the exhaustive search, and can greatly reduce the required computation or runtime. In addition, this algorithm does not need any pre-processing step or additional memory for its implementation, and can combine with other fast fractal algorithms to further improve the speed. Experimental results show that the runtime is reduced by about 50% of that of the exhaustive search method. When combined with the DCT Inner Product algorithm, the required runtime for the algorithm can be further reduced by about 50%. The proposed algorithm was also compared to two other fast fractal algorithms. Experimental results also show that our algorithm achieves a better efficiency and requires a much smaller amount of memory for implementation.
14714935
An efficient low bit-rate video-coding algorithm focusing on moving regions
Block-based motion estimation and compensation are the most popular techniques for video coding. However, as the shape and the structure of an object in a picture are arbitrary, the performance of such conventional block-based methods may not be satisfactory. In this paper, a very low bit-rate video coding algorithm that focuses on moving regions is proposed. The aim is to improve the coding performance, which gives better subjective and objective quality than that of the conventional coding methods at the same bit rate. Eight patterns are pre-defined to approximate the moving regions in a macroblock. The patterns are then used for motion estimation and compensation to reduce the prediction errors. Furthermore, in order to increase the compression performance, the residual errors of a macroblock are rearranged into a block with no significant increase of high-order DCT coefficients. As a result, both the prediction efficiency and the compression efficiency are improved.
96352
An Adaptive Direction-Based Location Update Scheme for Next Generation PCS Networks
This paper studies the location management problem in PCS network. An adaptive direction-based location update (ADBU) scheme is proposed in which a line-paging method is adopted to minimize the paging cost and an adaptive direction-based scheme is formulated for location update generation. Mobile terminals inspect their directions and a location update will be generated when the change in the direction of a mobile terminal is greater than the direction threshold. In the paper, we assume that the movement of a mobile terminal in a period of time can be divided into steps and each step has a destination. Then, we use a Gauss-Markov process to model the movement of a mobile terminal in each step. With the Gauss-Markov model and a feedback control mechanism, we estimate the optimal value for the direction threshold with the attempt to minimize the update cost and at the same time limit the paging cost using line-paging. Performance results have shown that the performance of ADBU is significantly better than another direction-based update scheme and the distance-based scheme a result of smaller paging cost and update processing cost.
12799586
Data broadcast for time-constrained read-only transactions in mobile computing systems
In this paper we propose broadcast algorithms, based on the policies proposed in previous studies, to disseminate data items to time-constrained read-only transactions. In the proposed algorithms, the number of data items requested by a transaction will be considered explicitly in selecting the data items for broadcast. The purpose of the algorithms is to reduce the number of transactions missing their deadlines, and to minimize their mean response time. A detailed simulation model of a mobile computing system has been developed and extensive simulation experiments have been performed to study the performance characteristics of the proposed broadcast algorithms, and the results show that our broadcast algorithms outperform previously proposed algorithms.
16770370
Impact of priority assignment on optimistic concurrency control in distributed real-time databases
In the studies of real-time concurrency control protocols (RT-CCPs), it is always assumed that earliest deadline first (EDF) is employed as the CPU scheduling algorithm. However, using purely (ultimate) deadline for priority assignment may not be suitable for distributed real-time database systems (DRTDBS) in which there exist different kinds of transactions, such as global and local transactions. In order to improve the performance, different priority assignment heuristics have to be used. In this paper, we have investigated the performance of different priority assignment heuristics for sub-transactions in DRTDBS with optimistic concurrency control (OCC) protocol. If is found that the heuristics, which are suitable for distributed real-time systems, are not suitable for DRTDBS. We find that our proposed heuristic, which considers both deadline constraint and data contention, can give the best performance.
32813168
Resolving conflicts with committing transactions in distributed real-time databases
In a distributed real-time database system, if data conflicts occur between executing and committing transactions, the performance can be severely affected. In this paper, we propose an approach, called deadline driven conflict resolution (DDCR), which integrates concurrency control and commitment management in resolving data conflicts between executing and committing transactions, while at the same time maintaining the schedules to be serializable. With DDCR, many of the data conflicts can be alleviated, and concurrent execution of transactions is allowed to access data items being held by committing transactions. The impact of temporary failures occurred during the commitment of a transaction on other transactions is reduced by reversing the dependencies between the transactions. Simulation experiments have been performed and the results show that DDCR can significantly improve the system performance especially when the duration for the voting phase is long.
42469158
Concurrency control for real-time database systems with mixed transactions
This paper proposes a real-time concurrency control protocol called Reduced Ceiling Protocol (RCP) for database systems consisting of hard and soft real-time transactions. In the RCP, the schedulability of hard real-time transactions is guaranteed by reserving the data items for them and by eliminating the blocking time from soft real-time transactions. Different concurrency control strategies are used to resolve the data conflicts between different combinations of hard and soft real-time transactions. We have shown the characteristics of the schedules generated from the RCP. Simulation experiments have been performed to study the performance of the RCP as compared with the optimistic concurrency control with broadcast commit (OCC-BC). It has been found that the RCP can guarantee the performance of the hard real-time transactions and at the same time reduce the number of deadline missing of the soft real-time transactions.