Alan Pearmain

Blind image data hiding based on self reference

For most watermark applications, it is often desired to retrieve the embedded information without access to the host data, which is a so-called blind watermarking technique. Most of the available blind watermarking schemes either suffer significantly from host data interference or require expense of storage. Therefore, a simple and effective blind watermarking scheme is expected. In this paper, we present a kind of blind watermarking technique, which is based on relative modulation of the pixel value/DCT coefficient value by referring to its estimated one. This technique entirely eliminates the effect of host data interference, thus having considerable advantage over previous counterpart watermarking schemes. Especially, our DCT AC-estimation-based technique reveals extraordinary robustness against numerical attacks, such as noise addition, filtering and JPEG compression.

Blind MPEG-2 video watermarking robust against geometric attacks: a set of approaches in DCT domain

A set of robust MPEG-2 video watermarking techniques is proposed, focusing on commonly used typical geometric processing for bit-rate reduction, cropping, removal of any rows, arbitrary-ratio downscaling, and frame dropping. Both the embedding and the extraction of watermarks are done in the compressed domain, so the computational cost is low. Moreover, the watermark extraction is blind, i.e., no original unwatermarked MPEG-2 video is needed for watermark extraction. The presented technique is applicable not only to MPEG-2 video, but also to other DCT-based coding videos. Selected experimental results validate our techniques.

Customized television: standards compliant advanced digital television

This paper describes a European Union supported collaborative project called CustomTV based on the premise that future TV sets will provide all sorts of multimedia information and interactivity, as well as manage all such services according to each users or group of users preferences/profiles. We have demonstrated the potential of recent standards (MPEG-4 and MPEG-7) to implement such a scenario by building the following services: an advanced EPG, weather forecasting, and stock exchange/flight information.

Unequal error protection with the H.264 flexible macroblock ordering

In this paper the flexible macroblock ordering (FMO or arbitrary slice ordering) feature of the H.264/AVC codec has been used to improve the robustness of the transmitted video through unreliable channels. FMO improves the decoded video quality remarkably in the presence of an appropriate error concealment algorithm. There are a number of mapping structures to distribute the macroblocks in individual slice groups. In this paper, we propose a new mapping scheme that provides an opportunity for transmission layers to protect the macroblocks that are more important. This will introduce a new unequal error protection (UEP) scheme based on FMO. Our simulation results show that this UEP scheme is efficient and successful, especially at high bit error rates.

Content-based multimedia data access in Internet video communication

This paper presents a platform for the development and evaluation of MPEG-4 functionalities. The implemented functionalities are content-based multimedia data access, content-based manipulation and bitstream editing, hybrid natural and synthetic data combination, content-based scalability. The system was implemented with Java.

An FMO based error resilience method in H.264/AVC and its UEP application in DVB-H link layer

Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO) is one of the new error resilience tools introduced in H264/AVC. Several slice grouping methods have been studied for improving error robustness using FMO. In this paper, a simple and fast slice grouping method for inter frames is introduced. Fast mode decision and early Skip Mode decision are applied for the first encoding pass, and only the features that are available at the stage of early Skip Mode decision are used for the classification. The computation time cost can be reduced by about 50% on average compared to traditional methods. The proposed scheme is tested under the proposed Unequal Error Protection scheme at the DVB-H link layer. The results are compared to the standard MPE-FEC EEP scheme using traditional FMO type ‘interleaved’ at the DVB-H link layer. It is shown that the proposed scheme can provide improved error robustness for high error rate channels in a DVB-H system.

An improved FMO slice grouping method for error resilience in H.264/AVC

An improved slice group mapping method for inter frames using FMO in H.264/AVC is proposed in this paper. To avoid the extra cost introduced by updating the slice group map, the fast mode decision and early Skip mode decision are applied for the first encoding pass, and only the features that are available at the stage of early Skip mode decision and before the seven mode decision are used for the classification. The proposed method can be applied with UEP schemes for mobile channel transmission. With ideal UEP schemes, it can improve PSNR for up to 4dB for the Foreman sequence and up to 8dB for the News sequence under an erroneous channel. The computation time cost can be saved by 30% for News and 40% for Foreman compared with conventional methods.

USING METADATA TO PROVIDE SCALABLE BROADCAST AND INTERNET CONTENT AND SERVICES

The convergence of broadcasting and the Internet, the growth of digital TV and the increasing user mobility are the main driving forces behind the European IST SAVANT (Synchronised and Scalable AV content Across NeTworks) project. SAVANT [1] aims to simultaneously employ broadcast and telecom networks to achieve added-value services for digital and interactive TV, using scalable content and scalable services to allow end users to retrieve interrelated and synchronised multimedia content on terminals with different capabilities under varying network conditions. This scalable approach implies the automated adaptation of content and services to different user terminals and user preferences. It also supports the intelligent distribution of content based on the capabilities of the networks present. The adaptation of content and services relies on content and media management, and semantics-based annotation, delivery and access. SAVANT aims to build on metadata standards, such as MPEG-7, TV-AnyTime and MPEG-21, to support the different aspects of automatic adaptation and personalisation. This paper examines different metadata standards for providing scalable content and services within the SAVANT system (Section 3) motivated by the SAVANT scenarios (Section 2).

Using MPEG-7 at the consumer terminal in broadcasting

The European Union IST research programme SAMBITS (System for Advanced Multimedia Broadcast and IT Services) project is using Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), the DVB Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) standard, MPEG- Open image in new window and MPEG- Open image in new window in a studio production and multimedia terminal system to integrate broadcast data and Internet data. This involves using data delivery over multiple paths and the use of a back channel for interaction. MPEG- Open image in new window is being used to identify programme content and to construct queries to allow users to identify and retrieve interesting related content. Searching for content is being carried out using the HySpirit search engine. The paper deals with terminal design issues, the use of MPEG- Open image in new window for broadcasting applications and using a consumer broadcasting terminal for searching for material related to a broadcast.AbstractThe European Union IST research programme SAMBITS (System for Advanced Multimedia Broadcast and IT Services) project is using Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), the DVB Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) standard, MPEG- and MPEG- in a studio production and multimedia terminal system to integrate broadcast data and Internet data. This involves using data delivery over multiple paths and the use of a back channel for interaction. MPEG- is being used to identify programme content and to construct queries to allow users to identify and retrieve interesting related content. Searching for content is being carried out using the HySpirit search engine. The paper deals with terminal design issues, the use of MPEG- for broadcasting applications and using a consumer broadcasting terminal for searching for material related to a broadcast.

Blind MPEG-2 video watermarking robust against scaling

Blind watermarking techniques that need no original information during watermark detection are more desirable than informed ones for practical usage and convenience in watermark extraction. In this paper, a blind MPEG-2 watermarking technique which is robust against arbitrary ratio scaling is described. It can be directly applied in other block-DCT based video compression techniques. The main advantage of the scheme is its simplicity, blindness and adjustable watermark payload by trading-off with imperceptibility and robustness. Since the watermark extraction is based on self numerical references within frames of watermarked video, synchronization between the original and watermarked video is not necessary for detection.