• ETRI Journal
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.122-135
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• 2004

Although frame-based MPEG-4 video services have been successfully deployed since 2000, MPEG-4 video coding is now facing great competition in becoming a dominant player in the market. Object-based coding is one of the key functionalities of MPEG-4 video coding. Real-time object-based video encoding is also important for multimedia broadcasting for the near future. Object-based video services using MPEG-4 have not yet made a successful debut due to several reasons. One of the critical problems is the coding complexity of object-based video coding over frame-based video coding. Since a video object is described with an arbitrary shape, the bitstream contains not only motion and texture data but also shape data. This has introduced additional complexity to the decoder side as well as to the encoder side. In this paper, we have analyzed the current MPEG-4 video encoding tools and proposed efficient coding technologies that reduce the complexity of the encoder. Using the proposed coding schemes, we have obtained a 56 percent reduction in shape-coding complexity over the MPEG-4 video reference software (Microsoft version, 2000 edition).

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2009.01a
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• pp.294-297
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• 2009

Multi-view video consists of a set of multiple video sequences from multiple viewpoints or view directions in the same scene. It contains extremely a large amount of data and some extra information to be stored or transmitted to the user. This paper presents inter-view correlations among video objects and the background to reduce the prediction complexity while achieving a high coding efficiency in multi-view video coding. Our proposed algorism is based on object-based segmentation scheme that utilizes video object information obtained from the coded base view. This set of data help us to predict disparity vectors and motion vectors in enhancement views by employing object registration, which leads to high compression and low-complexity coding scheme for enhancement views. An experimental results show that the superiority can provide an improvement of PSNR gain 2.5.3 dB compared to the simulcast.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 1999.06a
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• pp.165.1-170
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• 1999

Object segmentation fro natural video scenes has recently become one of very active research to pics due to the object-based video coding standard MPEG-4. Object detection and isolation is also useful for object-based indexing and search of video content, which is a goal of the emerging new standard, MPEG-7. In this paper, an automatic segmentation method of moving objects in image sequence is presented which is applicable to multimedia content authoring for MPEG-4, and two different segmentation approaches suitable for surveillance applications are addressed in raw data domain and compressed bitstream domains. We also propose an object-based video description scheme based on object segmentation for video indexing purposes.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.24 no.12B
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• pp.2349-2358
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• 1999

Object-based stereoscopic video coding scheme is presented in this paper. In conventional BMA based stereoscopic video coding for low bit rate transmission, image prediction errors such as block artifacts and mosquito phenomena are occurred. In order to reduce these errors, object based coding scheme is adopted. The proposed scheme consists of preprocessing, object extraction, and object update procedures. The preprocessing procedure extracts non-object regions having low reliability for motion and disparity estimation. This procedure prohibits extracting inaccurate objects. For the better prediction of left channel image, the disparity information is added to the object extraction. And the proposed algorithm can reduce the accumulated error through the object update procedure that detects newly emerging objects, merges objects that have the same object-disparity and object motion, and splits object which has large image prediction error. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms improve the quality of the prediction without block artifacts and mosquito phenomena.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.51-62
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• 2003

A new video segmentation algorithm for segmentation-based video coding is proposed. The method uses a new criterion based on similarities in both motion and brightness. Brightness and motion information are incorporated in a single segmentation procedure. The actual segmentation is accomplished using a region-growing technique based on the watershed algorithm. In addition, a tracking technique is used in subsequent frames to achieve a coherent segmentation through time. Simulation results show that the proposed method is effective in determining object boundaries not easily found using the statistic criterion alone.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.529-541
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• 2006

In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic segmentation method which can be used to generate video object plane (VOP) for object based coding scheme and multimedia authoring environment. Semi-automatic segmentation can be considered as a user-assisted segmentation technique. A user can initially mark objects of interest around the object boundaries and then the selected objects are continuously separated from the un selected areas through time evolution in the image sequences. The proposed segmentation method consists of two processing steps: partially manual intra-frame segmentation and fully automatic inter-frame segmentation. The intra-frame segmentation incorporates user-assistance to define the meaningful complete visual object of interest to be segmentation and decides precise object boundary. The inter-frame segmentation involves boundary and region tracking to obtain temporal coherence of moving object based on the object boundary information of previous frame. The proposed method shows stable and efficient results that could be suitable for many digital video applications such as multimedia contents authoring, content based coding and indexing. Based on this result, we have developed objects based video editing system with several convenient editing functions.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2004.11c
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• pp.291-294
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• 2004

Semantic video object extraction is important for tracking meaningful objects in video and object-based video coding. We propose a fast semiautomatic video object extraction algorithm which combines a watershed segmentation schemes and chamfer distance transform. Initial object boundaries in the first frame are defined by a human before the tracking, and fast video object tracking can be achieved by tracking only motion-detected regions in a video frame. Experimental results shows that the boundaries of tracking video object arc close to real video object boundaries and the proposed algorithm is promising in terms of speed.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.47-56
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• 2004

This paper describes a new bit allocation algorithm that can achieve a constant bit rate when coding multiple video objects, while improving rate-distortion (R-D) performance over the VM5 method for MPEG-4 object-based video coding. In particular, we propose two models to estimate the rate-distortion characteristics of coded objects as well as skipped objects. Based on the proposed models, we present several R-D coding modes with spatio-temporal trade-offs to improve coding efficiency. The proposed algorithm is performed at the object level for object-based video coding. Simulation results demonstrate moderate improvement at low as well as high bit rates. The proposed algorithm can produce the actual coded bits very close to the target bits over a wide range of bit rates. Consequently, the proposed algerian has not experienced any buffer overflow or underflow over the bit rates between 32 kbps and 256 kbps.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.24 no.9B
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• pp.1755-1766
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• 1999

A region-based video codec based on the H.263+ standard is examined and its associated novel rate control scheme is proposed in this work. The region-based coding scheme is a hybrid method that consists of the traditional block DCT coding and the object-based coding. Basically, we adopt H.263+ as the platform, and develop a fast macroblock-based segmentation method to implement the region-based video codec. The proposed rate control solution includes rate control in three levels: encoding frame selection, frame-layer rate control and macroblock-layer rate control. The goal is to enhance the visual quality of decoded frames at low bit rates. The efficiency of proposed rate control scheme applied to the region-based video codes is demonstrated via several typical test sequences.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.25 no.8B
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• pp.1424-1435
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• 2000

A bit-rate controller that can achieve a constant bit rate when coding object-based video sequences is an important part to achieve an adaptation to bit-rate constraints, desired video quality, distribution of bits among objects, relationship between texture and shape coding, and determination of frame skip or not. Therefore we design content-based bit rate controller which will be used for relevant bit-rate control. The implementation is an extension of MPEG-4 rate control algorithm which employs a quadratic rate-quantizer model. The importance of different objects in a video is analyzed and segmented into a number of VOPs which are adaptively bit-allocated using the object-based modelling. Some test sequences are observed by a number of non-experts and interests in each object are analysed. The initial total target bit-rate for all objects is obtained by using the proposed technique. Then the total target bits are jointly analyzed for preventing from overflow or underflow of the buffer fullness. The target bits are distributed to each object in view of its importance, not only of statistical analysis such as motion vector magnitude, size of object shape, and coding distortion of previous frame. The scheme is compared with the rate controller adopted by the MPEG-4 VM8 video coder by representing their statistics and performance.