19896198
Cross-Layer Design for Multimedia Delivery over Wireless Networks
Video summarization has gained increased popularity in the emerging multimedia and communications applications. However, very limited work has been conducted to address the transmission problem of video summary frames. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer optimization framework for delivering video summaries over wireless networks. Within a rate-distortion theoretical framework, the source coding, allowable retransmission, and adaptive modulation and coding have been jointly optimized, which reflects the joint selection of parameters in physical, data link and application layers. The goal here is to achieve the best video quality and content coverage from the received summary frames as well as meet the delay constraint. In this paper, this problem is formulated and solved by using Lagrangian relaxation and dynamic programming. Simulation results indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed optimization framework, especially when the delay budget imposed by the upper layer applications is small, where more than 12% distortion gain can be achieved
14473430
An optimal shape encoding scheme using skeleton decomposition
This paper presents an operational rate-distortion (ORD) optimal approach for skeleton-based boundary encoding. The boundary information is first decomposed into skeleton and distance signals, by which a more efficient representation of the original boundary results. Curves of arbitrary order are utilized for approximating the skeleton and distance signals. For a given bit budget for a video frame, we solve the problem of choosing the number and location of the control points for all skeleton and distance signals and for all boundaries within a frame, so that the overall distortion is minimized. The problem is solved with the use of Lagrangian relaxation and a shortest path algorithm in a 4D directed acyclic graph (DAG) we propose. By defining a path selection pattern, we reduce the computational complexity of the 4D DAG shortest path algorithm from O(N/sup -5/) to O(N/sup -4/), where N is the number of admissible control points for a skeleton. A suboptimal solution is also presented for further reducing the computational complexity of the algorithm to O(N/sup -2/). The proposed algorithm outperforms experimentally other competing algorithms.
16950996
Joint source-channel coding for wireless object-based video communications utilizing data hiding
In recent years, joint source-channel coding for multimedia communications has gained increased popularity. However, very limited work has been conducted to address the problem of joint source-channel coding for object-based video. In this paper, we propose a data hiding scheme that improves the error resilience of object-based video by adaptively embedding the shape and motion information into the texture data. Within a rate-distortion theoretical framework, the source coding, channel coding, data embedding, and decoder error concealment are jointly optimized based on knowledge of the transmission channel conditions. Our goal is to achieve the best video quality as expressed by the minimum total expected distortion. The optimization problem is solved using Lagrangian relaxation and dynamic programming. The performance of the proposed scheme is tested using simulations of a Rayleigh-fading wireless channel, and the algorithm is implemented based on the MPEG-4 verification model. Experimental results indicate that the proposed hybrid source-channel coding scheme significantly outperforms methods without data hiding or unequal error protection
7895439
An efficient rate-distortion optimal shape coding approach utilizing a skeleton-based decomposition
In this paper, we present a new shape-coding approach, which decouples the shape information into two independent signal data sets; the skeleton and the boundary distance from the skeleton. The major benefit of this approach is that it allows for a more flexible tradeoff between approximation error and bit budget. Curves of arbitrary order can be utilized for approximating both the skeleton and distance signals. For a given bit budget for a video frame, we solve the problem of choosing the number and location of the control points for all skeleton and distance signals of all boundaries within a frame, so that the overall distortion is minimized. An operational rate-distortion (ORD) optimal approach using Lagrangian relaxation and a four-dimensional direct acyclic graph (DAG) shortest path algorithm is developed for solving the problem. To reduce the computational complexity from O(N(5)) to O(N(3)), where N is the number of admissible control points for a skeleton, a suboptimal greedy-trellis search algorithm is proposed and compared with the optimal algorithm. In addition, an even more efficient algorithm with computational complexity O(N(2)) that finds an ORD optimal solution using a relaxed distortion criterion is also proposed and compared with the optimal solution. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approaches outperform existing ORD optimal approaches, which do not follow the same decomposition of the source data.
11673267
Object-based video compression scheme with optimal bit allocation among shape, motion and texture
In object-based video, the encoding of the video data is decoupled into the encoding of shape, motion and texture information, which enables certain functionalities like content-based interactivity and scalability. However, the problem of how to jointly encode these separate signals to reach the best coding efficiency has never been solved thoroughly. In this paper, we present an operational rate-distortion optimal bit allocation scheme that provides a solution to this problem. Our approach is based on the Lagrangian relaxation and dynamic programming. Experimental results indicate that the proposed optimal encoding approach has considerable gains over an ad-hoc method without optimization. Furthermore the proposed algorithm is much more efficient than exhaustive search.
15384375
A hybrid source-channel coding scheme for object-based wireless video communications
In this paper, we study the joint source-channel coding of object-based video, and propose a data hiding scheme that improves the video error resilience by adaptively embedding the shape and motion information in the texture data. Within a rate-distortion theoretical framework, the source coding, channel coding, data embedding, and decoder error concealment are jointly optimized based on the knowledge of transmission channel conditions. The problem is solved using Lagrangian relaxation and dynamic programming. Experimental results indicate that the proposed hybrid source-channel coding scheme significantly outperforms methods without data hiding or unequal error protection
16518536
Automatic singer recognition of popular music recordings via estimation and modeling of solo vocal signals
In this paper, we investigate the problem of automatic singer identification, detection and tracking in popular music recordings with one or multiple singers. This problem reflects an important issue in multimedia applications that require the transcription and indexing of music data to meet the increasing demand for content-based information retrieval. The major challenges for this study arise from the fact that a singer's voice tends to be arbitrarily altered from time to time and is inextricably intertwined with the signal of the background accompaniment. To determine who is singing, or whether or when a particular singer is present in a music recording, methods are presented for separating vocal from nonvocal regions, for isolating singers' vocal characteristics from background music, and for distinguishing singers from one another. Experimental evaluations conducted on a pop music database consisting of solo and duet tracks confirm the validity of the proposed methods.
17761622
A consensus-based method for tracking: Modelling background scenario and foreground appearance
Modelling of the background (''uninteresting parts of the scene''), and of the foreground, play important roles in the tasks of visual detection and tracking of objects. This paper presents an effective and adaptive background modelling method for detecting foreground objects in both static and dynamic scenes. The proposed method computes SAmple CONsensus (SACON) of the background samples and estimates a statistical model of the background, per pixel. SACON exploits both color and motion information to detect foreground objects. SACON can deal with complex background scenarios including nonstationary scenes (such as moving trees, rain, and fountains), moved/inserted background objects, slowly moving foreground objects, illumination changes etc. However, it is one thing to detect objects that are not likely to be part of the background; it is another task to track those objects. Sample consensus is again utilized to model the appearance of foreground objects to facilitate tracking. This appearance model is employed to segment and track people through occlusions. Experimental results from several video sequences validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
2318961
A Novel Robust Statistical Method for Background Initialization and Visual Surveillance
In many visual tracking and surveillance systems, it is important to initialize a background model using a training video sequence which may include foreground objects. In such a case, robust statistical methods are required to handle random occurrences of foreground objects (i.e., outliers), as well as general image noise. The robust statistical method Median has been employed for initializing the background model. However, the Median can tolerate up to only 50% outliers, which cannot satisfy the requirements of some complicated environments. In this paper, we propose a novel robust method for the background initialization. The proposed method can tolerate more than 50% of foreground pixels and noise. We give quantitative evaluations on a number of video sequences and compare our proposed method with five other methods. Experiments show that our method can achieve very promising results in background initialization: including applications in video segmentation, visual tracking and surveillance.
29758508
Corner Detection Based on Finding Edge Points Locally
13006853
Novel likelihood estimation technique based on boosting detector
This paper presents novel likelihood estimation to be used for particle filter based object tracking. The likelihood estimation is built upon cascade object detector trained with Gentle AdaBoost (GAB), in order to capture the probability of existence of object. Two strategies are adopted to construct the likelihood functions: probability-intra-stage (PIS) corresponding to real output of each weak classifier in the same stage, and probability-outer-stage (POS) corresponding to the depth reached in the cascade detector. Five kinds of likelihood functions are thus proposed based on the trained GAB detector. Our experiment shows the likelihood functions are able to characterize probabilistically the existence of object accurately, having much higher confidence value in object regions than that in background, and that the integral strategy of PIS and POS is the best choice.