The edge-preserving bilateral filter (BF) is a widely used smoothing tool in many applications. However, its brute-force implementation depends on the size of the box window. The shortcoming causes BF time-consuming for the image processing task with a large window. To make the computational complexity irrelevant to the window size, sparse approximations of the filtering kernels are calculated on a

The state-of-the-art objects discovery approaches can be categorized into two: deep learning methods based on a convolutional neural network with region proposals, and conventional machine learning methods based on topic models, low-rank matrix factorization, or image processing. The deep learning methods for objects discovery are based on sacrificing computational complexity to achieve precision,

Resampling detection is one of the most important topics in image forensics, and the most widely used method in resampling detection is spectral analysis. Since JPEG is the most widely used image format, it is reasonable that the resampling operation is processed on JPEG images. JPEG block artifacts bring severe interference to spectrum-based methods and degrade the detection performance. In addition

The rising popularity of social networks and cloud computing has greatly increased a number of JPEG compressed image exchanges. In this context, the security of the transmission channel and/or the cloud storage can be susceptible to privacy leaks. The selective encryption is an efficient tool to mask the image content and to protect confidentiality while remaining format-compliant. However, image processing

Due to the rate adaptation in hypertext transfer protocol adaptive streaming, the video quality delivered to the client keeps varying with time depending on the end-to-end network conditions. Moreover, the varying network conditions could also lead to the video client running out of the playback content resulting in rebuffering events. These factors affect the user satisfaction and cause degradation

This paper aims to present a novel accurate moving object detection method based on the conditional random field (CRF) for high efficiency video coding/H.265 compressed domain video sequences. For each block, the number of consumed bits, motion vectors (MVs), and partitioning modes for a given block is extracted from the compressed bitstream. After removing outlier MVs, compensating MVs are assigned

In traditional steganographic schemes, RGB three channels payloads are assigned equally in a true color image. In fact, the security of color image steganography relates not only to data-embedding algorithms but also to different payload partition. How to exploit inter-channel correlations to allocate payload for performance enhancement is still an open issue in color image steganography. In this paper

In stereoscopic 3D (S3D) color correction, visual inconsistency is a common problem that leads to perceptual quality degradations. In this paper, we propose an S3D image/video color correction strategy that resolves global, local, and temporal color discrepancies simultaneously. We achieve the image-based S3D color correction by three steps: a coarse-grain color correction for global color matching

The existing size measurement systems cannot meet the requirements of non-contact measurement tasks, and the main challenge is how to detect various objects and improve measurement accuracy. In order to solve these problems, a novel measurement system was proposed in this paper. In the system, a three-camera model with variable baselines was designed based on the trinocular vision. Three binocular

Radial distortion, which severely hinders object detection and semantic recognition, frequently exists in images captured using a wide-angle lens. Correction of this distortion of images is crucial in many computer vision applications. In this paper, we present distortion rectification generative adversarial network (DR-GAN), a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) for automatic radial DR

A problem that hinders good performance of general gait recognition systems is that the appearance features of gaits are more affected-prone by views than identities, especially when the walking direction of the probe gait is different from the register gait. This problem cannot be solved by traditional projection learning methods because these methods can learn only one projection matrix, and thus

Deep learning models have enjoyed great success for image related computer vision tasks such as image classification and object detection. For video related tasks such as human action recognition, however, the advancements are not as significant yet. The main challenge is the lack of effective and efficient models in modeling the rich temporal–spatial information in a video. We introduce a simple yet

In this paper, a novel least square regression method, named group low-rank representation-based discriminant linear regression (GLRRDLR), is proposed for multi-class classification. Unlike the conventional linear regression methods, the proposed method aims to learn a more discriminative projection. Specially, two main techniques are adopted to improve the discriminability of the projection. The first

Facial landmark detection plays an important role in face analysis tasks. Moreover, it is used as a prerequisite in many facial related applications, the simplicity, as well as effectiveness, is essential in the facial landmark detection. In this paper, we propose an effective facial landmark detection network and an associated learning framework with the geometric prior-generative adversarial network

Real-time detection of inshore ships plays an essential role in the efficient monitoring and management of maritime traffic and transportation for port management. Current ship detection methods which are mainly based on remote sensing images or radar images hardly meet real-time requirement due to the timeliness of image acquisition. In this paper, we propose to use visual images captured by an on-land

The newest generation of video coding standard, high efficiency video coding (HEVC), significantly improves the video compression efficiency by introducing more flexible block partitioning structures and richer coding modes than those of the previous coding standards; however, the encoders suffer from high-computational complexity, which greatly hinders their extensive application. Extensive studies

Discrete cosine transform (DCT) is an indispensable module in video codecs and is a major part in many video coding standards including the latest high efficiency video coding (HEVC). As the video resolution increases, both transform sizes and the number of transforms increase continuously which poses challenges to the reusability design especially in hardware implementation. This paper presents reconfigurable

In this paper, we propose a novel superpixel segmentation method using an adaptive nonlocal random walk (ANRW) algorithm. There are three main steps in our image superpixel segmentation algorithm. Our method is based on the random walk model, in which the seed points are produced to generate the initial superpixels by a gradient-based method in the first step. In the second step, the ANRW is proposed

Depth coding in 3D-HEVC deforms object shapes due to block-level edge-approximation and lacks efficient techniques to exploit the statistical redundancy, due to the frame-level clustering tendency in depth data, for higher coding gain at near-lossless quality. This paper presents a standalone mono-view depth sequence coder, which preserves edges implicitly by limiting quantization to the spatial-domain

This paper presents a fast depth map encoding for 3D-High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC) based on static decision trees. We used data mining and machine learning to correlate the encoder context attributes, building the static decision trees. Each decision tree defines that a depth map Coding Unit (CU) must be or not be split into smaller blocks, considering the encoding context through the evaluation

As an important computer vision task, image matching requires efficient and discriminative local descriptors. Most of the existing descriptors like SIFT and ORB are hand-crafted; therefore it is necessary to study more optimized descriptors through end-to-end learning. This paper proposes the compact binary descriptors learned with a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is efficient

Movies provide us with a mass of visual content as well as attracting stories. Existing methods have illustrated that understanding movie stories through only visual content is still a hard problem. In this paper, for answering questions about movies, we introduce a new dataset called PlotGraphs, as external knowledge. The dataset contains massive graph-based information of movies. In addition, we

Human action recognition (HAR) is an important field of research that intercepts with areas such as image processing, computer vision, and the design of fast algorithms, among others. HAR has several important applications including healthcare monitoring, security and surveillance, assisted living, smart homes, and video search and indexing. Despite recent developments in the field, major challenges

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The depth maps obtained by the consumer-level sensors are always noisy in the low-resolution (LR) domain. Existing methods for the guided depth super-resolution, which are based on the pre-defined local and global models, perform well in general cases (e.g., joint bilateral filter and Markov random field). However, such model-based methods may fail to describe the potential relationship between RGB-D

This paper addresses two fundamental problems: 1) learning discriminative model parameters and 2) avoiding over-fitting, which often occurs in regression-based classification tasks. We formulate these two problems in terms of relaxing both the strict binary label matrix and graph regularization term into more flexible forms so that the margins between different classes are enlarged as much as possible

In sonar applications, important information such as distributions of minerals, underwater creatures has a high probability of being contained in sonar images. In many underwater applications such as underwater rescue and biometric tracking, it is necessary to send sonar images underwater for further analysis. Due to the bad conditions of underwater acoustic channel and current underwater acoustic

Depth images play an important role and are prevalently used in many computer vision and computational imaging tasks. However, due to the limitation of active sensing technology, the captured depth images in practice usually suffer from low resolution and noise, which prevents its further applications. To remedy this problem, in this paper, we first propose an adaptive data fidelity formulation to

In this paper, we propose a multi-matrices low-rank decomposition method for image denoising. In this new method, the total variation (TV) norm is incorporated into low-rank approximation analysis to achieve structural smoothness and to improve quality of the recovered images. Our proposed mathematical framework for multi-matrices low-rank decomposition combines the nuclear norm, TV norm, and $\mathcal

Image fingerprinting is a technique that summarizes the perceptual characteristics of a digital image into an invariant digest, and it is one of the most effective solutions for digital rights management. Most conventional fingerprinting algorithms were developed by assembling manually designed feature extractor and quantizer, which requires extensive expert knowledge and may not capture the intrinsic

Steganalysis is a technique for detecting the existence of secret information hidden in digital media. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for JPEG steganalysis. In this scheme, we first design the diverse base filters which are able to obtain the image residuals from various directions. Then, we propose a cascade filter generation strategy to construct a set of high order cascade filters from

In this paper, we present a new image sensor architecture for fast and accurate compressive sensing (CS) of natural images. Measurement matrices usually employed in CS CMOS image sensors are recursive pseudo-random binary matrices. We have proved that the restricted isometry property of these matrices is limited by a low sparsity constant. The quality of these matrices is also affected by the non-idealities

Although high dynamic range (HDR) display has become popular recently, the legacy content such as standard dynamic range (SDR) video is still in service and needs to be properly converted on HDR display devices. Therefore, it is desirable for HDR TV sets to have the capability of automatically converting input SDR video into HDR video, which is called reverse tone mapping (RTM). In this paper, we propose

In this paper, entropy of singular values is used to promote the low rank property which accounts the inherent spatial redundancy and spectral correlation. Inspired from the connection between randomness and compactness of signals, we minimise ENtropy for low rank Tensor Completion (ENTC) using tensor-Singular Value Decomposition (t-SVD) framework. This approach assures better performance in excessive

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has recently attracted much attention due to its good interpretation in perception science and widely applications in various fields. In this paper, a novel graph regularized NMF algorithm called NMF with locality constrained adaptive graph (NMF-LCAG) is proposed. Compared with other NMF based algorithms, the proposed NMF-LCAG algorithm has the following advantages:

Vascular centerline extraction from angiography images plays an important role in computer-aided diagnosis of vascular disease. To solve the common problems related to noise and inconsistent vasculatures from uneven perfusion, this paper proposes an automatic framework for accurate vascular centerline extraction from angiograms that uses multi-probability fusion-based topology optimization. In this

A novel method for semantic action recognition through learning a pose lexicon is presented in this paper. A pose lexicon comprises a set of semantic poses, a set of visual poses, and a probabilistic mapping between the visual and semantic poses. This paper assumes that both the visual poses and mapping are hidden and proposes a method to simultaneously learn a visual pose model that estimates the

Direction-based methods are the most powerful and popular palmprint recognition methods. However, there is no existing work that completely analyzes the essential differences among different direction-based methods and explores the most discriminant direction representation of a palmprint. In this paper, we attempt to establish the connection between the direction feature extraction model and the discriminability

Head detection plays an important role in localizing and identifying persons from visual data. Most existing methods treat head detection as a specific form of object detection. Head detection is nontrivial due to the considerable difficulty in building the local and global information under conditions of unconstrained pose and orientation. To address these issues, this paper presents an effective

Many recent variational optical flow methods are not robust for illumination variance, and they only consider local image relation in terms of illumination. In this paper, we propose a new efficient illumination-invariance total variation optical flow method called the weighted regularization transform, which uses and optimizes the Weber’s Law. Our method exploits unequal probability as the weight

Discriminative correlation filter (DCF)-based trackers have recently exhibited high efficiency and impressive robustness to challenging factors, such as illumination change and partial occlusion. However, in cases with fast motion and full occlusion, these trackers drift off soon and can hardly re-detect the target from the restricted search region due to the boundary effect. On the contrary, recent

Fine-grained visual categorization is to recognize hundreds of subcategories belonging to the same basic-level category, which is a highly challenging task due to the quite subtle and local visual distinctions among similar subcategories. Most existing methods generally learn part detectors to discover discriminative regions for better categorization performance. However, not all parts are beneficial

Sports video analysis has received increasing attention in recent years. Athlete tracking and action recognition are its two major issues that are highly related to each other; however, they are individually considered and processed in the existing studies. In this paper, we propose a joint framework for athlete tracking and action recognition in sports videos. In athlete tracking, we propose a scaling

In real life, group activity recognition plays a significant and fundamental role in a variety of applications, e.g. sports video analysis, abnormal behavior detection, and intelligent surveillance. In a complex dynamic scene, a crucial yet challenging issue is how to better model the spatio-temporal contextual information and inter-person relationship. In this paper, we present a novel attentive semantic

One key challenge to learning-based video compression is that motion predictive coding, a very effective tool for video compression, can hardly be trained into a neural network. In this paper, we propose the concept of PixelMotionCNN (PMCNN) which includes motion extension and hybrid prediction networks. PMCNN can model spatiotemporal coherence to effectively perform predictive coding inside the learning

Video summarization (VSUMM) has become a popular method in processing massive video data. The key point of VSUMM is to select the key frames to represent the effective contents of a video sequence. The existing methods can only extract the static images of videos as the content summarization, but they ignore the representation of motion information. To cope with these issues, a novel framework for

Hashing has been recognized as an efficient representation learning method to effectively handle big data due to its low computational complexity and memory cost. Most of the existing hashing methods focus on learning the low-dimensional vectorized binary features based on the high-dimensional raw vectorized features. However, the studies on how to obtain preferable binary codes from the original 2D

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This paper proposes a bio-inspired visual motion estimation algorithm based on motion energy, along with its compact very-large-scale integration (VLSI) architecture using low-cost embedded systems. The algorithm mimics motion perception functions of retina, V1, and MT neurons in a primate visual system. It involves operations of ternary edge extraction, spatiotemporal filtering, motion energy extraction

Image super-resolution, a process to enhance image resolution, has important applications in satellite imaging, high definition television, medical imaging, etc. Many existing approaches use multiple low-resolution images to recover one high-resolution image. In this paper, we present an iterative scheme to solve single image super-resolution problems. It recovers a high quality high-resolution image

This paper proposes a novel model on intra coding for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which simultaneously predicts blocks of pixels with optimal rate distortion. It utilizes the spatial statistical correlation for the optimal prediction based on 2-D contexts, in addition to formulating the data-driven structural interdependences to make the prediction error coherent with the probability distribution