• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.33-42
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose an efficient segmentation algerian using morphological grayscale reconstruction for region-based coding. Each segmentation stage consists of simplification, marker extraction and decision. The simplification removes unnecessary components to make an easier segmentation. The marker extraction finds the flat zones which are the seed points from the simplified image. The decision is to locate the contours of regions detected by the marker extraction. For the simplification, we use a new connected operator based on the size and contrast. In the marker extraction stage, the regions reconstructed to original values we excluded from the candidate marker. For the other regions, the regions which are larger than structuring elements or have higher contrast than a threshold value are selected as markers. For the initial segmentation, the conventional hierarchical watershed algorithm and the extracted markers are used. Finally in the region merging stage, we propose an efficient region merging algorithm which preserves a high quality in terms of the number of regions. At the same time, the pairs which have higher contrast than a threshold are excluded from the region merging stage. Experimental results show that the proposed marker extraction method produces a small number of markers, while maintaining high quality and that the proposed region merging algorithm achieves a good performance in terms of the image quality and the number of regions.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.129-137
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• 2001

Matching pursuit algorithm was successfully demonstrated useful in low bit-rate video coding, However, one of the practical concerns related to applying the matching pursuit algorithm to application is its massive computation required for finding bases whose weighted sum best approximates the given input image. The main contribution of this paper is that we provide a new method that can drastically reduce the computational load without any degradation of image quality. Its main idea is based on reducing the number of inner product calculation required for finding best bases because the complexity of matching pursuit algorithm is due to the exhaustive local inner product calculation. As the first step, we compute a matrix which is the 1-D inner product of the given motion-compensated error input image with the 1-D vertical Gabor functions using the separable property of Gabor bases. In the second step, we calculate length of each vector in the matrix that corresponds to 1-D horizontal Gabor function, and compare the length with the current maximum absolute inner product value so far. According to the result of this comparison, one can decide whether or not to calculate the inner product. Since most of them do not need to calculate the inner product value, one can significantly reduce the computational load. Experimental results show that proposed method reduces about 70% of inner product calculation compared to the Neff's fast algorithm without any degradation of image quality.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.6C
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• pp.614-622
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• 2006

In this paper, we propose an efficient packetization method to reduce the packetization overhead. For the purpose, we firstly verify the relationship between packet length and packet loss rate. The empirical results show that as the packet length is larger than the path MTU, the packet loss rate is drastically increased, producing poor visual quality at the receiver side. However, as the length of the packet is reduced, we should transmit more packets per frame and the packetization overhead will be increased. This increase in the packetization overhead reduces the number of bits allocated to the video data, resulting in the low visual quality. Therefore, each packet should be packetized to have the packet length close to the path MTU. In this paper, we show that the this process of the packetization with the constraint on the packet length is very similar to the dynamic storage allocation in the operating system. We had thoroughly surveyed the dynamic storage allocation methods used in the recent operating systems and propose to use the allocation methods for the video packetization. We empirically show that the proposed method can reduce the packetization overhead upto 28.3%, compared with the conventional sequential packetization method which have been widely used in Internet video transmission.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.169-181
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• 1997

In this paper, we propose and discuss about image enhancement techniques for MPEG-4. which represents very low bit-rate, content-based. and object-based hierarchical audio-visual coding standard. The proposed enhancement technique removes undesired artifacts arising in the compression procedure and increase resolution in both spatial and temporal domains. In order to remove undesired artifacts. we divide the MPEG-4 video algorithm in two parts: MPEG-2 like part and the new part. For removing artifacts caused by the first part. we adopt the conventional blocking artifacts algorithm developed for MPEG-2. On the other hand for removing artifacts caused by the second part. we provide a new degradation model. and propose the corresponding image restoration method. For increasing resolution of the MPEG-4 images, we propose a general framework of multichannel image interpolation process. which includes both spatial and temporal interpolations. As the MPEG-4 standard is under development. various sophisticated techniques are considered. but research on image enhancement techniques is relatively underestimated. By this reason. additional image enhancement techniques will become very important issue in realization phase of MPEG-4.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.44 no.12
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• pp.93-101
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• 2007

Small area and low power implementation are important requirements for various multimedia processing hardware, especially for mobile environment. This paper presents a hardware architecture of H.264/AVC Intra Prediction module aiming on small area and low power. A single arithmetic unit was shared and processed sequentially for all mode decisions and computations to predict an image frame. As a result, we could get smaller area and smaller memory size compared to other existing implementations. The proposed architecture was verified using the Altera Excalibur device, and the implemented hardware has been described in Verilog-HDL and synthesized on Samsung STD130 0.18um CMOS Standard Cell Library using Synopsys Design Compiler. The synthesis result was about 11.9K logic gates and 1078 byte internal SRAM and the maximum operating frequency was 107Mhz. It consumes 879,617 clocks to process one QCIF frame, which means it can process 121.5 QCIF$(176\times144)$ frames per second, therefore it shows that it can be used for real time H.264/AVC encoding of various multimedia applications.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.70-79
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• 2007

H.264/AVC has many repeated computation for motion estimation. Because of that, it takes much time to encode and it is very hard to implement into a real-time encoder. Many fast algorithms were proposed to reduce computation time but encoding quality couldn't be qualified. In this paper we proposed a new motion vector prediction method for efficient and fast full search H.264/AVC motion estimation. We proposed independent motion vector prediction and SAD share for motion estimation. Using our algorithm, motion estimation reduce calculation complexity 80% and less distortion of image (less PSNR drop) than previous full search scheme. We simulated our proposed method. Maximum Y PSNR drop is about 0.04 dB and average bit increasing is about 0.6%.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.149-159
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• 2001

The conventional block-based motion prediction suffers, especially in low bit-rate video application, from shortcomings such as blocking artifacts of motion field and unstable motion estimation. To overcome the deficiency, this paper proposes one method of adopting a new motion compensation scheme based on the irregular triangular mesh structure while keeping the current block-based DCT coding structure of H.263 as much as possible. To represent the reconstructed previous frame using minimal number of control points, the proposed method designs content-adaptive irregular triangular meshes, and then, estimate the motion vector of each control point using the affine transformation-based matching. The predicted current frame is obtained by applying the affine transformation to each triangular mesh. Experiment with the several real video sequences shows improvement both in objective and subjective picture quality over the conventional block-based H.263 method.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.196-206
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• 2004

This paper presents an efficient joint disparity-motion estimation algorithm for stereo sequence CODEC. Disparity vectors are estimated by the left and right motion vectors and previous disparity vectors for every frame. In order to obtain more accurate disparity vectors. we include a spatial prediction Process after the feint estimation. From joint estimation and spatial prediction, we can obtain accurate disparity vectors and then Increase coding efficiency. Finally, we proposed the backward quadtree decomposition. which helps the encoder to have a more detailed disparity vector map without transmitting additional coding bits for quadtree information. We confirmed superior performance of the proposed method through computer simulation.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.24 no.7B
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• pp.1378-1383
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• 1999

In this paper, an effective variable-block-based image compression technique using wavelet transform is proposed. Since the statistical property of each wavelet subband is different, we apply the adaptive quantization to each wavelet subband. In the proposed algorithm, each subband is divided into non-overlapping variable-sized blocks based on directional properties. In addition, we remove wavelet coefficients which are below a certain threshold value for coding efficiency. To compress the transformed data, the proposed algorithm quantizes the wavelet coefficients using scalar quantizer in LL subband and vector quantizers for other subbands to increase compression ratio. The proposed algorithm shows improvements in compression ratio as well as PSNR compared with the existing block-based compression algorithms. In addition, it does not cause any blocking artifacts in very low bit rates even though it is also a block-based method. The proposed algorithm also has advantage in computational complexity over the existing wavelet-based compression algorithms since it is a block-based algorithm.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Industry Society
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• v.4 no.10
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• pp.731-740
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• 2003

Since motion estimation remove the redundant data to employ the temporal correlations between adjacent frames in a video sequence, it plays an important role in digital video coding. And in the block matching algorithm, search patterns of different shapes or sizes and the distribution of motion vectors have a large impact on both the searching speed and the image quality. In this paper, we propose a new fast block matching algorithm using the small-cross search pattern and the block-based gradient descent search pattern. Our algorithm first finds the motion vectors that are close to the center of search window using the small-cross search pattern, and then quickly finds the other motion vectors that are not close to the center of search window using the block-based gradient descent search pattern. Through experiments, compared with the block-based gradient descent search algorithm(BBGDS), the proposed search algorithm improves as high as 26-40% in terms of average number of search point per motion vector estimation.