Synthesis Lectures on Image, Video, and Multimedia Processing – serie

The recognition of humans and their activities from video sequences is currently a very active area of research because of its applications in video surveillance, design of realistic entertainment systems, multimedia communications, and medical diagnosis.

In biological and medical imaging applications, tracking objects in motion is a critical task. Another unique feature of Biomedical Image Analysis: Tracking is the explanation of shape-based methods for biomedical image analysis.

This Lecture book is about objective image quality assessment—where the aim is to provide computational models that can automatically predict perceptual image quality.

An important merit of the MPEG-4 video standard is that it not only provided tools and algorithms for enhancing the compression efficiency of existing MPEG-2 and H.263 standards but also contributed key innovative solutions for new multimedia applications such as real-time video streaming to PCs and cell phones over Internet and wireless networks, interactive services, and multimedia access. Many of these solutions are currently used in practice or have been important stepping-stones for new standards and technologies. In this book, we do not aim at providing a complete reference for MPEG-4 video as many excellent references on the topic already exist. Instead, we focus on three topics that we believe formed key innovations of MPEG-4 video and that will continue to serve as an inspiration and basis for new, emerging standards, products, and technologies. The three topics highlighted in this book are object-based coding and scalability, Fine Granularity Scalability, and error resiliencetools. This book is aimed at engineering students as well as professionals interested in learning about these MPEG-4 technologies for multimedia streaming and interaction. Finally, it is not aimed as a substitute or manual for the MPEG-4 standard, but rather as a tutorial focused on the principles and algorithms underlying it.

This book presents an overview of the guidelines and strategies for transitioning an image or video processing algorithm from a research environment into a real-time constrained environment.

Freeform sampling handles three kinds of problems: sample reduction, minimum sampling rate to meet an error requirement, and minimization of reconstruction error given a fixed number of samples. Algorithms of active sampling are developed for light field and show better results than the traditional uniform sampling approach.

This lecture presents research on a general framework for perceptual organization that was conducted mainly at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems of the University of Southern California.

SR techniques are being applied to a variety of fields, such as obtaining improved still images from video sequences (video printing), high definition television, high performance color Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screens, improvement of the quality of color images taken by one CCD, video surveillance, remote sensing, and medical imaging.

This book deals with the problem of joint source-channel video transmission, i.e., the joint optimal allocation of resources at the application layer and the other network layers, such as data rate adaptation, channel coding, power adaptation in wireless networks, quality of service (QoS) support from the network, and packet scheduling, for efficient video transmission. Real-time video communication applications, such as videoconferencing, video telephony, and on-demand video streaming, have gained increased popularity. However, a key problem in video transmission over the existing Internet and wireless networks is the incompatibility between the nature of the network conditions and the QoS requirements (in terms, for example, of bandwidth, delay, and packet loss) of real-time video applications. To deal with this incompatibility, a natural approach is to adapt the end-system to the network. The joint source-channel coding approach aims to efficiently perform content-aware cross-layerresource allocation, thus increasing the communication efficiency of multiple network layers. Our purpose in this book is to review the basic elements of the state-of-the-art approaches toward joint source-channel video transmission for wired and wireless systems. In this book, we present a general resource-distortion optimization framework, which is used throughout the book to guide our discussions on various techniques of joint source-channel video transmission. In this framework, network resources from multiple layers are assigned to each video packet according to its level of importance. It provides not only an optimization benchmark against which the performance of other sub-optimal systems can be evaluated, but also a useful tool for assessing the effectiveness of different error control components in practical system design. This book is therefore written to be accessible to researchers, expert industrial R&D engineers, and university students who are interested in the cutting edge technologies in joint source-channel video transmission. Contents: Introduction / Elements of a Video Communication System / Joint Source-Channel Coding / Error-Resilient Video Coding / Channel Modeling and Channel Coding / Internet Video Transmission / Wireless Video Transmission / Conclusions

The sequel to the popular lecture book entitled Biomedical Image Analysis: Tracking, this book on Biomedical Image Analysis: Segmentation tackles the challenging task of segmenting biological and medical images.

This lecture describes the author's approach to the representation of color spaces and their use for color image processing. However, once the essential defining element of this vector space is identified, it can be extended to other color spaces, perhaps for different creatures and devices, and dimensions other than three.

Table of Contents: Remote Sensing from Earth Observation Satellites / The Statistics of Remote Sensing Images / Remote Sensing Feature Selection and Extraction / Classification / Spectral Mixture Analysis / Estimation of Physical Parameters

Table of Contents: Introduction / Characteristics of the Wavelet Transform / Generic Wavelet-based Coding Systems / The FBI Fingerprint Image Compression Standard / Set Partition Embedded Block (SPECK) Coding / Tree-based Wavelet Transform Coding Systems / Rate Control for Embedded Block Coders / Conclusion

Video context analysis is an active and vibrant research area, which provides means for extracting, analyzing and understanding behavior of a single target and multiple targets.

Frameworks that enhance the performance of sparse models in such applications by imposing constraints based on the prior discriminatory information and the underlying geometrical structure, and kernelizing the sparse coding and dictionary learning methods are presented.

Current vision systems are designed to perform in normal weather condition. However, no one can escape from severe weather conditions. Bad weather reduces scene contrast and visibility, which results in degradation in the performance of various computer vision algorithms such as object tracking, segmentation and recognition. Thus, current vision systems must include some mechanisms that enable them to perform up to the mark in bad weather conditions such as rain and fog. Rain causes the spatial and temporal intensity variations in images or video frames. These intensity changes are due to the random distribution and high velocities of the raindrops. Fog causes low contrast and whiteness in the image and leads to a shift in the color. This book has studied rain and fog from the perspective of vision. The book has two main goals: 1) removal of rain from videos captured by a moving and static camera, 2) removal of the fog from images and videos captured by a moving single uncalibrated camera system. The book begins with a literature survey. Pros and cons of the selected prior art algorithms are described, and a general framework for the development of an efficient rain removal algorithm is explored. Temporal and spatiotemporal properties of rain pixels are analyzed and using these properties, two rain removal algorithms for the videos captured by a static camera are developed. For the removal of rain, temporal and spatiotemporal algorithms require fewer numbers of consecutive frames which reduces buffer size and delay. These algorithms do not assume the shape, size and velocity of raindrops which make it robust to different rain conditions (i.e., heavy rain, light rain and moderate rain). In a practical situation, there is no ground truth available for rain video. Thus, no reference quality metric is very useful in measuring the efficacy of the rain removal algorithms. Temporal variance and spatiotemporal variance are presented in this book as no reference quality metrics. An efficient rain removal algorithm using meteorological properties of rain is developed. The relation among the orientation of the raindrops, wind velocity and terminal velocity is established. This relation is used in the estimation of shape-based features of the raindrop. Meteorological property-based features helped to discriminate the rain and non-rain pixels. Most of the prior art algorithms are designed for the videos captured by a static camera. The use of global motion compensation with all rain removal algorithms designed for videos captured by static camera results in better accuracy for videos captured by moving camera. Qualitative and quantitative results confirm that probabilistic temporal, spatiotemporal and meteorological algorithms outperformed other prior art algorithms in terms of the perceptual quality, buffer size, execution delay and system cost. The work presented in this book can find wide application in entertainment industries, transportation, tracking and consumer electronics. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Introduction / Analysis of Rain / Dataset and Performance Metrics / Important Rain Detection Algorithms / Probabilistic Approach for Detection and Removal of Rain / Impact of Camera Motion on Detection of Rain / Meteorological Approach for Detection and Removal of Rain from Videos / Conclusion and Scope of Future Work / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies

Presented fog removal algorithm is independent of the intensity of the fog, thus even in the case of the heavy fog presented algorithm performs well. Qualitative and quantitative results confirm that the presented fog removal algorithm outperformed previous algorithms in terms of perceptual quality, color fidelity and execution time.

The last few years have witnessed fast development on dictionary learning approaches for a set of visual computing tasks, largely due to their utilization in developing new techniques based on sparse representation.

Thus, it is highly desirable to develop an effective scheme for the high-order micro-video understanding.Micro-video understanding is, however, non-trivial due to the following challenges:(1) how to represent micro-videos that only convey one or few high-level themes or concepts;

Image fusion in remote sensing or pansharpening involves fusing spatial (panchromatic) and spectral (multispectral) images that are captured by different sensors on satellites.

This book offers an easily understood introduction to the core concepts of Virtual Reality, Virtual Environments and related topics of Augmented Reality and Extended Reality. If you find yourself enticed and mystified by this new technology, this book can help you make sense of its core concepts and internal workings.

This book offers an easily understood introduction to the core concepts of Virtual Reality, Virtual Environments and related topics of Augmented Reality and Extended Reality. If you find yourself enticed and mystified by this new technology, this book can help you make sense of its core concepts and internal workings.

"Game Design for Free to Play Live Service" is the ultimate guide to designing successful free-to-play mobile games. With case studies and expert insights, this book is essential reading for any game developer looking to create a hit mobile game.