High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is currently being prepared as the newest video coding standard of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group. The main goal of the HEVC standardization effort is to enable significantly improved compression performance relative to existing standards-in the range of 50% bit-rate reduction for equal perceptual video quality. This paper provides an overview of the technical features and characteristics of the HEVC standard.

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Overview of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard

This paper presents a novel and efficient facial image representation based on local binary pattern (LBP) texture features. The face image is divided into several regions from which the LBP feature distributions are extracted and concatenated into an enhanced feature vector to be used as a face descriptor. The performance of the proposed method is assessed in the face recognition problem under different challenges. Other applications and several extensions are also discussed

Face Description with Local Binary Patterns: Application to Face Recognition

From the Publisher: 
The accessible presentation of this book gives both a general view of the entire computer vision enterprise and also offers sufficient detail to be able to build useful applications. Users learn techniques that have proven to be useful by first-hand experience and a wide range of mathematical methods. A CD-ROM with every copy of the text contains source code for programming practice, color images, and illustrative movies. Comprehensive and up-to-date, this book includes essential topics that either reflect practical significance or are of theoretical importance. Topics are discussed in substantial and increasing depth. Application surveys describe numerous important application areas such as image based rendering and digital libraries. Many important algorithms broken down and illustrated in pseudo code. Appropriate for use by engineers as a comprehensive reference to the computer vision enterprise.

Computer vision : a modern approach = 计算机视觉 : 一种现代的方法

With the introduction of the H.264/AVC video coding standard, significant improvements have recently been demonstrated in video compression capability. The Joint Video Team of the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG has now also standardized a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of the H.264/AVC standard. SVC enables the transmission and decoding of partial bit streams to provide video services with lower temporal or spatial resolutions or reduced fidelity while retaining a reconstruction quality that is high relative to the rate of the partial bit streams. Hence, SVC provides functionalities such as graceful degradation in lossy transmission environments as well as bit rate, format, and power adaptation. These functionalities provide enhancements to transmission and storage applications. SVC has achieved significant improvements in coding efficiency with an increased degree of supported scalability relative to the scalable profiles of prior video coding standards. This paper provides an overview of the basic concepts for extending H.264/AVC towards SVC. Moreover, the basic tools for providing temporal, spatial, and quality scalability are described in detail and experimentally analyzed regarding their efficiency and complexity.

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Overview of the Scalable Video Coding Extension of the H.264/AVC Standard

We have witnessed great interest and a wealth of promise in content-based image retrieval as an emerging technology. While the last decade laid foundation to such promise, it also paved the way for a large number of new techniques and systems, got many new people involved, and triggered stronger association of weakly related fields. In this article, we survey almost 300 key theoretical and empirical contributions in the current decade related to image retrieval and automatic image annotation, and in the process discuss the spawning of related subfields. We also discuss significant challenges involved in the adaptation of existing image retrieval techniques to build systems that can be useful in the real world. In retrospect of what has been achieved so far, we also conjecture what the future may hold for image retrieval research.

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Image retrieval: Ideas, influences, and trends of the new age

This paper presents an overview of color and texture descriptors that have been approved for the Final Committee Draft of the MPEG-7 standard. The color and texture descriptors that are described in this paper have undergone extensive evaluation and development during the past two years. Evaluation criteria include effectiveness of the descriptors in similarity retrieval, as well as extraction, storage, and representation complexities. The color descriptors in the standard include a histogram descriptor that is coded using the Haar transform, a color structure histogram, a dominant color descriptor, and a color layout descriptor. The three texture descriptors include one that characterizes homogeneous texture regions and another that represents the local edge distribution. A compact descriptor that facilitates texture browsing is also defined. Each of the descriptors is explained in detail by their semantics, extraction and usage. The effectiveness is documented by experimental results.

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Color and texture descriptors

The compression capability of several generations of video coding standards is compared by means of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and subjective testing results. A unified approach is applied to the analysis of designs, including H.262/MPEG-2 Video, H.263, MPEG-4 Visual, H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The results of subjective tests for WVGA and HD sequences indicate that HEVC encoders can achieve equivalent subjective reproduction quality as encoders that conform to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC when using approximately 50% less bit rate on average. The HEVC design is shown to be especially effective for low bit rates, high-resolution video content, and low-delay communication applications. The measured subjective improvement somewhat exceeds the improvement measured by the PSNR metric.

http://amalia.img.lx.it.pt/~fp/cav/Additional_material/HEVC-Performance.pdf

Comparison of the Coding Efficiency of Video Coding Standards—Including High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)

Three-dimensional (3-D) frequency coding is an alternative approach to hybrid coding concepts used in today's standards. The first part of this paper presents a study on concepts for temporal-axis frequency decomposition along the motion trajectory in video sequences. It is shown that, if a two-band split is used, it is possible to overcome the problem of spatial inhomogeneity in the motion vector field (MVF), which occurs at the positions of uncovered and covered areas. In these cases, original pixel values from one frame are placed into the lowpass-band signal, while displaced-frame-difference values are embedded into the highpass band. This technique is applicable with arbitrary MVF's; examples with block-matching and interpolative motion compensation are given. Derivations are first performed for the example of two-tap quadrature mirror filters (QMF's), and then generalized to any linear-phase QMF's. With two-band analysis and synthesis stages arranged as cascade structures, higher resolution frequency decompositions are realizable. In the second part of the paper, encoding of the temporal-axis subband signals is discussed. A parallel filterbank scheme was used for spatial subband decomposition, and adaptive lattice vector quantization was employed to approach the entropy rate of the 3-D subband samples. Coding results suggest that high-motion video sequences can be encoded at significantly lower rates than those achievable with conventional hybrid coders. Main advantages are the high energy compaction capability and the nonrecursive decoder structure. In the conclusion, the scheme is interpreted more generally, viewed as a motion-compensated short-time spectral analysis of video sequences, which can adapt to the quickness of changes. Although a 3-D multiresolution representation of the picture information is produced, a true multiresolution representation of motion information, based on spatio-temporal decimation and interpolation of the MVF, is regarded as the still-missing part. >

Three-dimensional subband coding with motion compensation

Scalable video coding is attractive due to the capability of reconstructing lower resolution or lower quality signals from partial bit streams. This allows for simple solutions in adaptation to network and terminal capabilities. Different modalities of scalability are specified by video coding standards like MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. This paper gives a short overview over these techniques and analyzes in more detail the encoder/decoder drift problem, which is the major reason why scalable coding has been significantly less efficient than single-layer coding in most of these implementations. Only recently, new scalable video coding technology has evolved, which seems to close the gap of compression performance compared to state of the art single-layer video coding. New methods of efficient enhancement layer prediction were developed to improve traditional (motion-compensated hybrid) scalable coders, providing more flexible compromises on the drift problem. As a new technology trend, motion-compensated spatiotemporal wavelet coding has matured which entirely discards the drift and allows most flexible combinations of spatial, temporal, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scalability with fine granularity over a broad range of data rates.

Jens-Rainer Ohm

Papers

Overview of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard

Color and texture descriptors

Comparison of the Coding Efficiency of Video Coding Standards—Including High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)

Three-dimensional subband coding with motion compensation

Advances in Scalable Video Coding