Digital Coding of Waveforms

Video indexing and retrieval have a wide spectrum of promising applications, motivating the interest of researchers worldwide. This paper offers a tutorial and an overview of the landscape of general strategies in visual content-based video indexing and retrieval, focusing on methods for video structure analysis, including shot boundary detection, key frame extraction and scene segmentation, extraction of features including static key frame features, object features and motion features, video data mining, video annotation, video retrieval including query interfaces, similarity measure and relevance feedback, and video browsing. Finally, we analyze future research directions.

A Survey on Visual Content-Based Video Indexing and Retrieval

Automatic video analysis from urban surveillance cameras is a fast-emerging field based on computer vision techniques. We present here a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art computer vision for traffic video with a critical analysis and an outlook to future research directions. This field is of increasing relevance for intelligent transport systems (ITSs). The decreasing hardware cost and, therefore, the increasing deployment of cameras have opened a wide application field for video analytics. Several monitoring objectives such as congestion, traffic rule violation, and vehicle interaction can be targeted using cameras that were typically originally installed for human operators. Systems for the detection and classification of vehicles on highways have successfully been using classical visual surveillance techniques such as background estimation and motion tracking for some time. The urban domain is more challenging with respect to traffic density, lower camera angles that lead to a high degree of occlusion, and the variety of road users. Methods from object categorization and 3-D modeling have inspired more advanced techniques to tackle these challenges. There is no commonly used data set or benchmark challenge, which makes the direct comparison of the proposed algorithms difficult. In addition, evaluation under challenging weather conditions (e.g., rain, fog, and darkness) would be desirable but is rarely performed. Future work should be directed toward robust combined detectors and classifiers for all road users, with a focus on realistic conditions during evaluation.

A Review of Computer Vision Techniques for the Analysis of Urban Traffic

In this letter, we present a reversible data hiding scheme based on histogram modification. We exploit a binary tree structure to solve the problem of communicating pairs of peak points. Distribution of pixel differences is used to achieve large hiding capacity while keeping the distortion low. We also adopt a histogram shifting technique to prevent overflow and underflow. Performance comparisons with other existing schemes are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme.

Reversible Data Hiding Based on Histogram Modification of Pixel Differences

Prediction-error expansion (PEE) is an important technique of reversible watermarking which can embed large payloads into digital images with low distortion. In this paper, the PEE technique is further investigated and an efficient reversible watermarking scheme is proposed, by incorporating in PEE two new strategies, namely, adaptive embedding and pixel selection. Unlike conventional PEE which embeds data uniformly, we propose to adaptively embed 1 or 2 bits into expandable pixel according to the local complexity. This avoids expanding pixels with large prediction-errors, and thus, it reduces embedding impact by decreasing the maximum modification to pixel values. Meanwhile, adaptive PEE allows very large payload in a single embedding pass, and it improves the capacity limit of conventional PEE. We also propose to select pixels of smooth area for data embedding and leave rough pixels unchanged. In this way, compared with conventional PEE, a more sharply distributed prediction-error histogram is obtained and a better visual quality of watermarked image is observed. With these improvements, our method outperforms conventional PEE. Its superiority over other state-of-the-art methods is also demonstrated experimentally.

Efficient Reversible Watermarking Based on Adaptive Prediction-Error Expansion and Pixel Selection

Depth image-based rendering (DIBR) is generally used to synthesize virtual view images in free viewpoint television (FTV) and three-dimensional (3-D) video. One of the main problems in DIBR is how to fill the holes caused by disocclusion regions and inaccurate depth values. In this paper, we propose a new hole filling method using a depth based in-painting technique. Experimental results show that the proposed hole filling method provides improved rendering quality both objectively and subjectively.

Hole filling method using depth based in-painting for view synthesis in free viewpoint television and 3-D video

In this paper, we propose a new reversible image authentication technique based on watermarking where if the image is authentic, the distortion due to embedding can be completely removed from the watermarked image after the hidden data has been extracted. This technique utilizes histogram characteristics of the difference image and modifies pixel values slightly to embed more data than other lossless data hiding algorithm. We show that the lower bound of the PSNR (peak-signal-to-noise-ratio) values of watermarked images are 51.14 dB. Moreover, the proposed scheme is quite simple and the execution time is rather short. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can detect any modifications of the watermarked image

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Reversiblee Image Authentication Based on Watermarking

The new MPEG-4 video coding standard enables content-based functionalities. In order to support the philosophy of the MPEG-4 visual standard, each frame of video sequences should be represented in terms of video object planes (VOPs). In other words, video objects to be encoded in still pictures or video sequences should be prepared before the encoding process starts. Therefore, it requires a prior decomposition of sequences into VOPs so that each VOP represents a moving object. This paper addresses an image segmentation method for separating moving objects from the background in image sequences. The proposed method utilizes the following spatio-temporal information. (1) For localization of moving objects in the image sequence, two consecutive image frames in the temporal direction are examined and a hypothesis testing is performed by comparing two variance estimates from two consecutive difference images, which results in an F-test. (2) Spatial segmentation is performed to divide each image into semantic regions and to find precise object boundaries of the moving objects. The temporal segmentation yields a change detection mask that indicates moving areas (foreground) and nonmoving areas (background), and spatial segmentation produces spatial segmentation masks. A combination of the spatial and temporal segmentation masks produces VOPs faithfully. This paper presents various experimental results.

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A VOP generation tool: automatic segmentation of moving objects in image sequences based on spatio-temporal information

There are provided a method and an apparatus for generating a multi- viewpoint depth map, and a method for generating a disparity of a multi- viewpoint image. A method for generating a multi-viewpoint depth map according to the present invention includes the steps of: (a) acquiring a multi-viewpoint image constituted by a plurality of images by using a plurality of cameras; (b) acquiring an image and depth information by using a depth camera; (c) estimating coordinates of the same point in a space in the plurality of images by using the acquired depth information; (d) determining disparities in the plurality of images with respect to in the same point by searching a predetermined region around the estimated coordinates; and (e) generating a multi-viewpoint depth map by using the determined disparities. According to the above-mentioned present invention, it is possible to generate a multi-viewpoint depth map within a shorter time and generate a multi-viewpoint depth map having higher quality than a multi-viewpoint depth map generated by using known stereo matching.

Method and apparatus for generating multi-viewpoint depth map, method for generating disparity of multi-viewpoint image

This paper proposes an object segmentation and tracking algorithm for visual surveillance applications. In order to detect moving objects from a dynamic background scene which may have temporal clutters such as swaying plants, we devised an adaptive background update method and a motion classification rule. A two-dimensional token-based tracking system using a Kalman filter is designed to track individual objects under occlusion conditions. We propose a new occlusion reasoning approach where we consider two different types of occlusion: explicit occlusion and implicit occlusion. By tracking individual objects with segmented data, we can generate motion trajectories and set a motion model using polynomial curve fitting. The trajectory model is used as an indexing key for accessing the individual object in the semantic level. We also propose an efficient way of indexing and searching based on object-specific features at different semantic levels. The proposed searching scheme supports various queries including query by example, query by sketch, and query on weighting parameters for event-based retrieval. When retrieving an interested video clip, the system returns the best matching event in the similarity order. In addition, we implement a temporal event graph for direct accessing and browsing of a specific event in the video sequence.

Yo-Sung Ho

Papers

Hole filling method using depth based in-painting for view synthesis in free viewpoint television and 3-D video

Reversiblee Image Authentication Based on Watermarking

A VOP generation tool: automatic segmentation of moving objects in image sequences based on spatio-temporal information

Method and apparatus for generating multi-viewpoint depth map, method for generating disparity of multi-viewpoint image

Content-based event retrieval using semantic scene interpretation for automated traffic surveillance