Quantization (image processing)

About: Quantization (image processing) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 7977 publications have been published within this topic receiving 126632 citations.

Finding Waldo, or focus of attention using local color information

Abstract: We present a method to locate an "object" in a color image, or more precisely, to select a set of likely locations for the object. The model is assumed to be of known color distribution, which permits the use color-space processing. A new method is presented, which exploits more information than the previous backprojection algorithm of Swain and Ballard (1990) at a competitive complexity. Precisely, the new algorithm is based on matching local histograms with the model, instead of directly replacing pixels with a confidence that they belong to the object. We prove that a simple version of this algorithm degenerates into backprojection in the worst case. In addition, we show how to estimate the scale of the model. Results are shown on pictures digitized from the famous "Where is Waldo" books. Issues concerning the optimal choice of a color space and its quantization are carefully considered and studied in this application. We also propose to use co-occurrence histograms to deal with cases where important color variations can be expected. >

Quantization of Fully Convolutional Networks for Accurate Biomedical Image Segmentation

Abstract: With pervasive applications of medical imaging in health-care, biomedical image segmentation plays a central role in quantitative analysis, clinical diagnosis, and medical intervention. Since manual annotation suffers limited reproducibility, arduous efforts, and excessive time, automatic segmentation is desired to process increasingly larger scale histopathological data. Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs), particularly fully convolutional networks (FCNs), have been widely applied to biomedical image segmentation, attaining much improved performance. At the same time, quantization of DNNs has become an active research topic, which aims to represent weights with less memory (precision) to considerably reduce memory and computation requirements of DNNs while maintaining acceptable accuracy. In this paper, we apply quantization techniques to FCNs for accurate biomedical image segmentation. Unlike existing literatures on quantization which primarily targets memory and computation complexity reduction, we apply quantization as a method to reduce overfitting in FCNs for better accuracy. Specifically, we focus on a state-of-the-art segmentation framework, suggestive annotation [26], which judiciously extracts representative annotation samples from the original training dataset, obtaining an effective small-sized balanced training dataset. We develop two new quantization processes for this framework: (1) suggestive annotation with quantization for highly representative training samples, and (2) network training with quantization for high accuracy. Extensive experiments on the MICCAI Gland dataset show that both quantization processes can improve the segmentation performance, and our proposed method exceeds the current state-of-the-art performance by up to 1%. In addition, our method has a reduction of up to 6.4x on memory usage.

Energy-Efficient Image Compression for Resource-Constrained Platforms

Abstract: One of the most important goals of current and future sensor networks is energy-efficient communication of images. This paper presents a quantitative comparison between the energy costs associated with 1) direct transmission of uncompressed images and 2) sensor platform-based JPEG compression followed by transmission of the compressed image data. JPEG compression computations are mapped onto various resource-constrained platforms using a design environment that allows computation using the minimum integer and fractional bit-widths needed in view of other approximations inherent in the compression process and choice of image quality parameters. Advanced applications of JPEG, such as region of interest coding and successive/progressive transmission, are also examined. Detailed experimental results examining the tradeoffs in processor resources, processing/transmission time, bandwidth utilization, image quality, and overall energy consumption are presented.

Reducing Image Compression Artifacts by Structural Sparse Representation and Quantization Constraint Prior

Abstract: The block discrete cosine transform (BDCT) has been widely used in current image and video coding standards, owing to its good energy compaction and decorrelation properties. However, because of independent quantization of DCT coefficients in each block, BDCT usually gives rise to visually annoying blocking compression artifacts, especially at low bit rates. In this paper, to reduce blocking artifacts and obtain high-quality images, image deblocking is cast as an optimization problem within maximum a posteriori framework, and a novel algorithm for image deblocking by using structural sparse representation (SSR) prior and quantization constraint (QC) prior is proposed. The SSR prior is utilized to simultaneously enforce the intrinsic local sparsity and the nonlocal self-similarity of natural images, while QC is explicitly incorporated to ensure a more reliable and robust estimation. A new split Bregman iteration-based method with an adaptively adjusted regularization parameter is developed to solve the proposed optimization problem, which makes the entire algorithm more practical. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed image-deblocking algorithm combining SSR and QC outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in both peak signal-to-noise ratio and visual perception.

Deep Video Hashing

Abstract: In this work, we propose a deep video hashing (DVH) method for scalable video search. Unlike most existing video hashing methods that first extract features for each single frame and then use conventional image hashing techniques, our DVH learns binary codes for the entire video with a deep learning framework so that both the temporal and discriminative information can be well exploited. Specifically, we fuse the temporal information across different frames within each video to learn the feature representation under two criteria: the distance between a feature pair obtained at the top layer is small if they are from the same class, and large if they are from different classes; and the quantization loss between the real-valued features and the binary codes is minimized. We exploit different deep architectures to utilize spatial-temporal information in different manners and compare them with single-frame-based deep models and state-of-the-art image hashing methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.