Chishyan Liaw

The efficient VLSI design of BI-CUBIC convolution interpolation for digital image processing

This paper presents an efficient VLSI design of bicubic convolution interpolation for digital image processing. The architecture of reducing the computational complexity of generating coefficients as well as decreasing number of memory access times is proposed. Our proposed method provides a simple hardware architecture design, low computation cost and is easy to implement. Based on our technique, the high-speed VLSI architecture has been successfully designed and implemented with TSMC 0.13 mum standard cell library. The simulation results demonstrate that the high performance architecture of bi-cubic convolution interpolation at 279 MHz with 30643 gates in a 498times498 mum chip is able to process digital image scaling for HDTV in real-time.

An Efficient Architecture of Extended Linear Interpolation for Image Processing

This paper presents a novel image interpolation method, extended linear interpolation, which is a low-cost and high-speed architecture with interpolation quality compatible to that of bi-cubic convolution interpolation. The method of reducing computational complexity of generating weighting coefficients is proposed. Based on the approach, the efficient hardware architecture is designed under real-time requirement. Compared to the latest bi-cubic hardware design work, the architecture saves about 60% of hardware cost. The architecture is implemented on the Virtex-II FPGA, and the high-speed VLSI has been successfully designed and implemented with TSMC 0.13μm standard cell library. The simulation results demonstrate that the efficient VLSI of extended linear interpolation at 267MHz with 25980 gates in a 450 × 450μm^2 chip is able to process digital image scaling for HDTV in real-time.

Motion Adaptive De-interlacing with Local Scene Changes Detection

This paper presents a motion adaptive de- interlacing technique with precise interfield information by local scene changes detection. Scene changes happen fairly often in film broadcasting and they tend to destabilize the quality of performance while de-interlacing technique is utilized. Our local scene change detection method for de-interlacing uses the precise interfield information as interpolation. The simulation results indicate that increasing the precision and stability of the interfield information promotes quality of video sequence.

Fast First-Order Polynomials Convolution Interpolation for Real-Time Digital Image Reconstruction

This letter presents a high-performance architecture of a novel first-order polynomial convolution interpolation for digital image scaling. A better quality of interpolation is achieved by using higher order model that requires complex computations. The kernel of the proposed method is built up of first-order polynomials and approximates the ideal sinc-function in the interval [-2, 2]. The proposed architecture reduces the computational complexity of generating weighting coefficients and provides a simple hardware architecture design and low computation cost, and easily meets real-time requirements. The architecture is implemented on the Virtex-II FPGA, and the high-performance very-large-scale integration architecture has been successfully designed and implemented with the TSMC 0.13 μm standard cell library. The simulation results indicate that the interpolation quality of the proposed architecture is mostly better than cubic convolution interpolations, and is able to process varying-ratio image scaling for high-definition television in real-time.

EVOLVING A TEAM IN A FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER GAME BY USING A GENETIC ALGORITHM

Evolving game agents in a first-person shooter game is important to game developers and players. Choosing a proper set of parameters in a multiplayer game is not a straightforward process because consideration must be given to a large number of parameters, and therefore requires effort and thorough knowledge of the game. Thus, numerous artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are applied in the designing of game characters’ behaviors. This study applied a genetic algorithm to evolve a team in the mode of One Flag CTF in Quake III Arena to behave intelligently. The source code of the team AI is modified, and the progress of the game is represented as a finite state machine. A fitness function is used to evaluate the effect of a teams tactics in certain circumstances during the game. The team as a whole evolves intelligently, and consequently, effective strategies are discovered and applied in various situations. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed evolution method is capable of evolving a teams behaviors and optimizing the commands in a shooter game. The evolution strategy enhances the original game AI and assists game designers in tuning the parameters more effectively. In addition, this adaptive capability increases the variety of a game and makes gameplay more interesting and challenging.

An Efficient Video De-interlacing with Scene Change Detection

An efficient video de-interlacing technique with scene change detection is proposed and its performances are examined. Scene changes happen quite often in film broadcasting and they tend to destabilize the quality of performance such as jagged effect, blurred effect, and artifacts effect, while de-interlacing technique is utilized. Therefore, the issue of scene change needs to be addressed with de-interlacing process. In the proposed method, de-interlacing begins with scene change detection, which is to ensure that the interfield information is used correctly. To improve the quality of de-interlacing, the factors of scene change are taken into account when de-interlacing techniques are applied. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm exhibits better performances than other interpolation algorithms

A High-Performance Architecture of Motion Adaptive De-interlacing with Reliable Interfield Information

Scene changes occur frequently in film broadcasting, and tend to destabilize the performance with blurred, jagged, and artifacts effects when de-interlacing methods are utilized. This paper presents an efficient VLSI architecture of video de-interlacing with considering scene change to improve the quality of video results. This de-interlacing architecture contains three main parts. The first is scene change detection, which is designed based on examining the absolute pixel difference value of two adjacent even or odd fields. The second is background index mechanism for classifying motion and non-motion pixels of input field. The third component, spatial-temporal edge-based median filter, is used to deal with the interpolation for those motion pixels. Comparing with the existed de-interlacing approaches, our architecture design can significantly ameliorate the PSNRs of the video sequences with various scene changes; for other situations, it also maintains better performances. The proposed architecture has been implemented as a VLSI chip based on UMC 0.18-μm CMOS technology process. The total gate count is 30114 and its layout area is about 710 × 710-μm. The power consumption is 39.78 mW at working frequency 128.2 MHz, which is able to process de-interlacing for HDTV in real-time.

Concealing information in image mosaics based on tile image features

This article presents a steganographic scheme that conceals secret information in image mosaics based on tile image features. An image mosaic, which is composed of many tiles, resembles a source image that is divided into small grids of identical size. The feature values of each grid and tile image are extracted by a wavelet transform. The similarity between a grid and a candidate tile is taken into account and secret data is inserted into a tile image according to its feature value. There is no modification of tile images and the stego-mosaic as a whole resembles its source image. The hidden data can be extracted by finding the feature values of all tile images of the mosaic. The stego-mosaic looks like its source image to avoid any suspicion; the hidden data are secure since no codebook is required to extract the concealed data and they are not easy to extract without knowing the algorithm. In addition, the concealment capacity is easy to expand by taking more bits of the coefficient of each tile. The experimental results have demonstrated that the embedded image mosaics created from the proposed method have good image qualities and large hidden capacity.

Polygonal approximation using an annealed chaotic Hopfield network

In the paper, the polygonal approximation is regarded as finding the minimum value of restricted function which is defined by the arc-to-chord deviation between the polygon and the curve. We construct a 2D annealed chaotic Hopfield network, ACHN, array with the rows representing the curve points and the columns representing the breakpoints of the approximation polygon. The proposed ACHN overcomes the disadvantage of converging toward local minimum of traditional neural network due to its chaotic, so we can find the approximated polygon more similar to the curve.

A video de-interlacing with precise interfield information by hybrid scene change detection

This paper presents a motion adaptive de-interlacing technique with precise interfield information by global and local scene changes detection. Scene changes happen fairly often in film broadcasting and they tend to destabilize the quality of performance while de-interlacing technique is utilized. The proposed method utilizes the low computational complexity of de-interlacing technique to improve video sequences on the progressive devices. Our hybrid scene change detection method for de-interlacing uses the precise interfield information as interpolation. The simulation results indicate that increasing the precision and stability of the interfield information promotes quality of video sequence. The results also show that the proposed method presents a higher quality of video sequences than other interpolation methods.