Ting-Lan Lin

Video Motion Vector Recovery Method Using Decoding Partition Information

This paper presents a novel motion vector recovery and error concealment algorithm with the utilization of encoding partition information for H.264/AVC. The motion vectors for each missing pixel location are derived using available neighboring pixel motion vectors, which contribute to the generation of the missing motion vectors inversely proportional to the distance between them. The motion extrapolation method is used to project the encoding partition information from the reference frame into the current frame with different levels of overlapping of lost pixels. The different levels of overlapping can help determine the estimated encoding partition information in the lost macroblock (MB). Finally, the pixels that are determined to be of the same estimated partition share the same motion vector in order to maintain the integrity of the estimated moving objects in the lost MB. This proposed pixel-based motion vector with partition (PMVP) method compares with the state-of-the-art Zhous method, Lins method, and Lies method. For total average in packet loss rates of 3%, 7%, 16%, and 20%, PMVP is better than Zhou by 0.88, 1.02, 1.05, and 1.01 dB, respectively; Lin by 0.22, 0.32, 0.35, and 0.33 dB, respectively; and Lie by 4.12, 4.98, 4.15, and 3.88 dB, respectively. Therefore, the proposed PMVP performs the best on average among all the methods.

Reducing perceptual discontinuity in peer-to-peer live video streaming based on frame loss visibility information

When a live streaming video is delivered over a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, the chunk delay is always a problem of great concern. A serious chunk delay can produce obvious discontinuity of the streaming video, resulting in low satisfaction of the service. Video on P2P is divided into several chunks and distributed to the peers. Each chunk has its own playback time deadline. The playback time of a delayed chunk is overlapped with that of the next chunk. Traditionally, fast forwarding and uniform frame skipping are the two methods used to deal with the chunk delay problem. However, they may easily produce the effect of perceptual discontinuity and perceived by a viewer. This paper proposes a frame dropping method based on frame loss visibility information in order to maintain visual continuity of the video. The frame with lower loss visibility will be dropped first. In a previous work, the idea of loss visibility was applied by a router to develop a frame dropping strategy when network congestion occurs. In this work, we apply it to the chunk-level playback controller in P2P network. The number of frames to be dropped is dependent on the value of chunk delay. The main difference between the proposed approach and the traditional methods is that different frames could be chosen and dropped. A viewers satisfaction is evaluated by using the way of subjective video quality assessment. The proposed method produces higher MOS (mean opinion score) than that of the two traditional methods.

VLSI Implementation of a Cost-Efficient Micro Control Unit With an Asymmetric Encryption for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

This paper presents a very large-scale integration (VLSI) circuit design of a micro control unit (MCU) for wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) in cost-intention. The proposed MCU design consists of an asynchronous interface, a multisensor controller, a register bank, a hardware-shared filter, a lossless compressor, an encryption encoder, an error correct coding (ECC) circuit, a universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter interface, a power management, and a QRS complex detector. A hardware-sharing technique was added to reduce the silicon area of a hardware-shared filter and provided functions in terms of high-pass, low-pass, and band-pass filters according to the uses of various body signals. The QRS complex detector was designed for calculating QRS information of the ECG signals. In addition, the QRS information is helpful to obtain the heart beats. The lossless compressor consists of an adaptive trending predictor and an extensible hybrid entropy encoder, which provides various methods to compress the different characteristics of body signals adaptively. Furthermore, an encryption encoder based on an asymmetric cryptography technique was designed to protect the private physical information during wireless transmission. The proposed MCU design in this paper contained 7.61k gate counts and consumed 1.33 mW when operating at 200 MHz by using a 90-nm CMOS process. Compared with previous designs, this paper has the benefits of increasing the average compression rate by over 12% in ECG signal, providing body signals analysis, and enhancing security of the WBSNs.

Backlight Dimming Algorithm Based on Video Quality Metric (VQM) for Video Contents

In this paper, we proposed a backlight dimming algorithm for videos, aiming to achieve better video quality measured in video quality metric (VQM) with controlled power consumption. In order to avoid the complex computation of VQM in the testing process, a training procedure is performed to find prediction model. For each training video, a VQM result curve corresponding to different clipping points is first built, to facilitate the consequent search for optimal clipping point. To build a prediction model for optimal clipping point to be used in testing stage, the optimal clipping point of each video is associated with the spatial information (SI) and temporal information (TI) of the video; the association is modeled by a 2-D LOWESS (LOcally WEighted Scatterplot Smoothing) surface. Therefore in the testing phase, for every video, the SI and TI are first computed, and mapped into the LOWESS model to find the predicted optimal clipping point, which is applied to all frames in the video. A generalized version of the proposed method is designed to have even better power reduction performance. The experiment results show that the generalized proposed work can achieve the best power reduction (17.9%), compared with state-of-the-art methods I2GEC (10.5%), MGEC4 (11.2%), MGEC16 (8.7%), and SPBD (8.7%). And the video quality of the generalized proposed method can be maintained, showing almost no visual difference with the original video. Thus, it is demonstrated that the proposed work can achieve good balance between video quality and power consumption.

Video error concealment method using motion vector estimation propagation

H.264 coding technology is the most commonly-used video compression technology. As H.264 videos in transmission, video packet losses inevitably occur. The error concealment method can solve the problem. For the lost block, we use the motion vector of neighboring available block to estimate the lost motion vectors, and the estimates propagate to predict all other missing motion vectors. By comparison against the state-of-the-art method, the proposed algorithm increases average PSNR by 1.93 dB on average.

Block-based content adaptive backlight controller VLSI design for local dimming LCDs

In this paper, a novel hardware-oriented local dimming content adaptive backlight control (CABC) algorithm is proposed for liquid crystal displays (LCDs). It utilizes an efficient backlight dimming algorithm to reduce the power consumption of the backlight module in LCD and uses a contrast compensation algorithm to compensate the brightness distortion. In order to dim the backlight power and compensate the brightness in real time, the proposed algorithm was realized by a VLSI technique. The VLSI architecture of this design includes a grayscale converter, a maximum detector, an average calculator, a clipped point detector, a brightness compensator, a brightness ratio calculator, a ratio table and a pixel compensator. This design was synthesized by a 0.18-μm technology. Its core area and gate counts are 501,782 μm2 and 42.65-K, respectively, when it operates at 100 MHz. Compared with previous backlight control algorithms, this work improved the average PSNR value over 0.26 dB and reduced the average power consumption of LCD backlight module over 8.29%.

Eye detection in CSBS-DP evaluation video

In this paper, we proposed the computer vision and behavior imaging science and technology into the field of treatment of children with special needs, aiming to use computer algorithms to automatically analyze childrens gaze, and further investigate childrens behavior patterns and distinguish whether children are with autism characteristics in our CSBS video. We perform a series of image processing methods, such as skin detection, face detection and eye detection. Preliminary results of eye detection for the CSBS setting are shown in the paper.

Novel gray-level mapping of image-quality power control technique for organic light emitting diode displays

In this paper, we propose a method to adjust the reference point of the existing work for gray-level mapping between the input and output image, to balance between image quality and power consumption in OLED (organic light-emitting diode). The proposed algorithm is aiming to achieve good balance between video quality and power consumption. The experiment results show that our work is better than the state-of-the-art work by 0.0357×10^9 lower power consumption in the case when the target PSNR is 30dB, and 0.007×10^9 lower power consumption in the case when the target PSNR is 40dB, where the image quality is kept similar for all methods.