Sharif Digital Repository

This paper addresses a new approach to segmentation and classification of audio through analysis of a smaller set of selective frames, which are identified by temporal decomposition (TD). These frames are located at the most steady instants, or event centroids, within a given block of the signal, which yield the maximal diversity over the set of selected features. Based on this selection scheme, the number of frames used in the analysis is reduced by at least 40%, while the temporal resolution is doubled as compared to that in typical audio classifiers. By constructing a classification system to segment audio into speech, music, speech-music, and others, it is shown that the proposed method... 

In this work, first, a Region of Interest (ROI)-based Unequal Loss Protection (ULP) scheme with no delay is proposed for High Definition (HD) interactive video applications such as video calls. The proposed scheme uses Data Partitioning and Flexible Macro block Ordering (FMO) tools of H.264/AVC and reduces error propagation. The obtained data demonstrates that this scheme achieves better ROI quality than others in high Packet Loss Rates (PLR). Second, it is also shown that the efficient scheme for protecting ROI-based interactive video applications in wide PLR ranges is switching both the Forward Error Correction (FEC) distribution pattern and the codec configuration between various... 

Embedding a secret message into a cover media without attracting any attention, known as steganography, is one of the methods used for hidden communication purposes. One of the cover media that can be used for steganography is speech. In this study, the authors propose a new steganography method in speech signals. In this method, the silence intervals of speech are found and the length (number of samples) of these intervals is changed to hide information. The main feature of our method is robustness to MPEG-1 layer III (MP3) compression. This method can hide information in a speech stream with very low processing time which makes it a real-time steganography method. The hiding capacity of... 

Abstract: Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have always been among the most popular topics in science fiction (sci-fi) movies. This paper endeavors to review popular movies containing Fictional Robots (FR) to extract the most common characteristics and interesting design ideas of robots portrayed in science fiction. To this end, 134 sci-fi films, including 108 unique FRs, were investigated regarding the robots’ different design aspects (e.g., appearance design, interactive design and artificial intelligence, and ethical and social design). Also, in each section of this paper, some characteristics of FRs are compared with real social robots. Since some researches point to the... 

There has been an increasing demand for interactive video transmission over the Internet for applications such as video conferencing, video calls, and telepresence applications. These applications are increasingly moving towards providing High Definition (HD) video quality to users. A key challenge in these applications is to preserve the quality of video when it is transported over best-effort networks that do not guarantee lossless transport of video packets. In such conditions, it is important to protect the transmitted video by using intelligent and adaptive protection schemes. Applications such as HD video conferencing require live interaction among participants, which limits the... 

Global motion estimation (GME) is an important technique in image and video processing. Whereas the direct global motion estimation techniques boast reasonable precision they tend to suffer from high computational complexity. As with indirect methods, though presenting lower computational complexity they mostly exhibit lower accuracy than their direct counterparts. In this paper, the authors introduce a robust algorithm for GME with near identical accuracy and almost 50-times faster than MPEG-4 verification model (VM). This approach entails two stages in which, first, motion vector of sampled block is employed to obtain initial GME then Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is applied to the... 

With rapid proliferation of affordable video capturing devices and state-of-the-art video editing software tools, it is now easier than ever to manipulate video contents. In this paper a passive method for copy/move video forgery detection in MPEG videos is proposed. The method first divides each video frame into suspicious and apparently innocent parts. Subsequently, an optical flow coefficient is computed from each part. Forgeries are located when an unusual trend in the optical flow coefficient of the suspicious object is detected. Experiments on a set of forged and original sequences validate the justifications made by the proposed method  

This paper presents a novel method for cooperative educational dissemination systems. Taking into consideration the inherent characteristics of distance learning video streams (existence of a few slow moving objects in a classroom), we have proposed a novel content-based video coding method that is very efficient at low bitrate channels. On the encoding side, we have applied a background subtraction algorithm for motion segmentation using a novel statistical background modeling approach. At each frame, the moving objects are extrapolated with a rectangular model and tracked frame by frame (which forms the only data needed to be sent over the channel). On the decoding side, we have used a new... 

This paper presents a novel video encoding method for cooperative educational dissemination systems. Taking into consideration the inherent characteristics of stereo cameras framework in our educational videos and the ability of determining objects in different depths in a scene, we have proposed a novel object-based video encoding based on "sprite coding" that supports the MPEG-4 Version 1 Main profile in order to transfer distance learning videos across narrow-band transmission links such as the Internet. This paper proposes a multi-layer video object layer generation scheme with foreground moving object extraction and background sprite generation using stereo camera property. The... 

Automatic brain tissue segmentation is a crucial task in diagnosis and treatment of medical images. This paper presents a new algorithm to segment different brain tissues, such as white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), cerebral spinal fluid (CSF), background (BKG), and tumor tissues. The proposed technique uses the modified intraframe coding yielded from H.264/(AVC), for feature extraction. Extracted features are then imposed to an artificial back propagation neural network (BPN) classifier to assign each block to its appropriate class. Since the newest coding standard, H.264/AVC, has the highest compression ratio, it decreases the dimension of extracted features and thus yields to a more... 

Due to fast growth of wireless mobile networks, video transmission over wireless media has been widely studied. As wireless networks are error prone, there is a high possibility of loss in sent packets. Since time limitations in real-time video applications should be met, the delay-related to resending packets is not acceptable and the error should to be concealed at receiver side. With respect to different concealment methods, two new methods for temporal error concealment are proposed. In the first method, an optimized set of motion vectors is formed using motion vectors in surrounding blocks of the lost macroblock, and then this set is searched for the best motion vector. For extending... 

Abstract Multiple Description Coding (MDC) is a technique where multiple streams from a video source are generated, each individually decodable and mutually refinable. MDC is a promising solution to overcome packet loss in video transmission over noisy channels, particularly for real-time applications in which retransmission of lost information is not practical. The error resiliency feature of MDC is achieved at the cost of redundancy, and the required amount of redundancy for each frame depends on the packet loss ratio and also the importance of the frame in the sequence. Due to the error propagation in video transmission over lossy channels, reference frames of a Group of Pictures (GOP)... 

Tracking vehicles across nonoverlapping cameras is required by video-based intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to efficiently calculate traffic parameters; such as link travel times and origin/destination counts. In traffic monitoring applications, cameras are usually mounted far from each other to cover wide areas. As such, object features (i.e., color information, shape, and direction) change significantly from one camera to another. These space-time differences raise serious challenges on efficient tracking. In this paper, we have presented a probabilistic model to solve the multicamera tracking task in a network of disjoint view cameras, with attention paid on estimating the density... 

Multiple Description Coding (MDC) is a technique for video transmission over error prone networks where the descriptions are routed over multiple paths. Intra coding like MDC provides error resiliency but coding in this mode must be decided with care since it degrades the compression ratio. In this paper, we present our investigation results for a new intra coding approach in MDC. We have found that, in MDC streams, the best policy is to encode selective frames as I-frame instead of coding some macroblocks of frames in intra mode. In order to find the most suitable I-frame positions within a given video stream, we developed a cost function based on which intra/inter frame type is decided.... 

There is growing interest in evaluating the impact of soft errors on multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) at application-level rather than architectural-level, particularly in multimedia applications to optimize system design. This has recently led to the concept of application-level correctness. In this paper, we consider the relationship between application-level correctness and system-level power management using voltage scaling technique with the aim to generate designs that are optimized in terms of power consumption, while providing acceptable application-level correctness and meeting real-time performance deadlines. We propose a novel voltage scaling technique based on linear... 

This paper presents an event based scheme for uncompressed video watermarking. The video signal is assumed to be a sequence of overlapping visual components - called events. We address this overlapping structure of video contents and present an event based approach through employing a block based Temporal Decomposition (TD) scheme. The TD describes a set of spectral parameters of the video as a linear combination of a set of temporally overlapping compact event functions. We have applied the decomposition results to digital video watermarking. To construct the matrix of parameters in the TD, Multiresolution Singular Value Decomposition (MR-SVD) is utilized and singular values of a set of... 

H.264/AVC, the latest video coding standard, achieves better video compression rates since it supports new features such as a large number of intra- and inter-prediction candidate modes. H.264/AVC adopts rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique to obtain the best intra- and inter-prediction, while maximizing visual quality and minimizing the required bit rate. However, the RDO reduces the encoding speed via the exhaustive evaluation of all candidate modes. In this paper, we decrease the encoding time by reducing the computational complexity of the prediction function and the number of candidate modes. First, we improve Pan's method, by eliminating the DC mode from the candidates. Second,...