• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.492-500
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• 2012

In this paper, improved contour region coding method is proposed to accomplish better depth map coding performance. First of all, in order to use correlation between color video and depth map, a structure in SVC is applied to 3DVC. This can reduce bit-rate of the depth map while supporting the video to be transferred via various collection of network. As the depth map is mainly used to synthesize videos from different views, corrupted contour region can damage the overall quality of video. We hereby adapt a new differential quantization method when separating the contour region. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve video quality by 0.06~0.5dB which translate the bit rate saving by 0.1~1.15%, when compared to the reference software.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.697-702
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• 2010

Contour artifact is known as the unintentional result of quantizing a flat area that has smooth gradients. In this letter, a decontouring algorithm is proposed to efficiently remove false contours that occur in typical block-based video coding applications. First, the algorithm goes through a refinement stage to determine candidate blocks probably having noticeable false contours with different kinds of features in a block. Then, pseudo-random noise masking is applied to those blocks to mitigate the contour artifacts. This block-based selective decontouring can efficiently remove the unnecessary processing of those blocks that have no false contour, which incidentally ensures a minor penalty in visual quality and computational complexity. The proposed algorithm was demonstrated, integrated into H.264/AVC, that visual quality can be significantly enhanced with an ignorable rate-distortion (RD) loss and an minor increase in computational complexity.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.187-195
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• 2005

A new segmentation-based image coding method which no needs transmission of contour data is proposed. The shape information acts as bottleneck in the segmentation-based video coding because it has much portion of transmission data. The proposed method segments a previous decoded frame, instead of a current frame. As a result, there is no need for transmission of contour information to a decoder. Therefore, the saved bits can be assigned to encode other information such as error signals. As shown in experiment results, if data rate is very highly increased due to abrupt motion under very low bit rate coding having limited transmission bits, PSNR of conventional block-based method go down about 20dB, while the proposed method shows a good reconstruction quality without rapid PSNR drop.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.597-605
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• 1999

In this paper, we propose a cardioangiography sequence image coding scheme which use a subtraction between initial image and current frame inserted contrast dye. Stable regions are obtained by the multithreshold and meaningful region is extracted by the images with stable region. The image with meaningful region is classified into contour and texture information. Contour information is coded by contour coding. And texture information is approximated by two-dimensional polynomial function and each coefficients is coded. Experimental results confirm that the sequence of cardioangiography are well reconstructed at the low bit rate (0.02∼0.04 bpp) and high compression ratio.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 1996.06a
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• pp.175-180
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• 1996

In this paper, a new image segmentation method based on merging of two low contrast neighbor regions iteratively is proposed. It is suitable for very low bit rate coding. The proposed method reduces efficiently contour information and preserves subjective and objective image quality. It consists of image segmentation using 4-level hierarchical structure based on mathematical morphology and 1-level region merging structure using the contrast difference of two adjacent neighbor regions. For each segmented region of the third level, two adjacent neighbor regions having low contrast difference value in fourth level based on contrast difference value is merged iteratively. It preserves image quality and shows the noticeable reduction of the contour information, so that it can improve the bottleneck problem of segmentation-based coding at very low bit rate.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.914-922
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• 1987

An image coding technique based on a segmentation, which utilizes a simplified description of regions composing an image, is investigated in this paper. The proposed coding technique consists of 3 stages: segmentation, contour coding. In this paper, emphasis was given to texture coding in order to improve a quality of an image. Split-and-merge method was employed for a segmentation. In the texture coding, a linear predictive coding(LPC), along with approximation technique based on a two-dimensional polynomial function was used to encode texture components. Depending on a size of region and a mean square error between an original and a reconstructed image, appropriate texture coding techniques were determined. A computer simulation on natural images indicates that an acceptable image quality at a compression ratio as high as 15-25 could be obtained. In comparison with a discrete cosine transform coding technique, which is the most typical coding technique in the first-generation coding, the proposed scheme leads to a better quality at compression ratio higher than 15-20.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.1691-1697
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• 1997

This paper presents a new motion compensated error coding method suitable for region based image coding system. Compared with block based conding, the region based coding improves subjective quality as it estimates and compensates 2D (or 3D) translantional, rotational, and scaling motion for each regions. although the region based coding has this advantage, its merit is reduced as bock-DCT (2D-DCT) is used to encode motion-compensated error. To overcome this problem, a new region adaptive motion compensated error coding technique which improver subjective and objective quality in the region boundary is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, regions with large error are estimated using contour of the regions and contrast between the regions. The regions estiated as those with large error are coded by arbitrarily shaped image segment coding method. The mask information of the coded regions is not transmitted because it is estimated as the same algorithm in the encoder and the decoder. The proposed region adaptive motion conpensated error coding method improves about 0.5dB when it is compared with conventional block based method.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.10 no.4 s.29
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• pp.632-642
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• 2005

This paper presents a new vertex selection scheme for the polygon-based contour approximation. In the proposed method, the entire contour is partitioned into partial segments and they are approximated adaptively with variable accuracy. The approximation accuracy of each segment is controlled based on its relative significance. By computing the relative significance with the texture degradation in the approximation error region, the visual quality enhancement in the reconstructed frames can be achieved under the same amount of the contour data. For this purpose, a decision rule for $d_{max}$ is derived based on inter-region contrasts. In addition, an adaptive vertex selection method using the derived rule is proposed. Experimental results are presented to show the superiority of the proposed method over conventional methods.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.31B no.4
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• pp.62-76
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• 1994

In this paper, a segmentation-based coding technique as applied to video sequences is proposed. A proposed method separates an image into contour and texture parts, then the visually-sensitive contour part is represented by chain codes and the visually-insensitive texture part is reconstructed by a representative motion vector of a region and mean of the segmented frame difference. It uses a change detector to find moving areas and adopts variable blocks to represent different motions correctly. For better quality of reconstructed images, the displaced frame difference between the original image and the motion compensated image reconstructed by the representative motion vector is segmented. Computer simulation with several video sequences shows that the proposed method gives better performance than the conventional ones in terms of the peak signal to noise ratio(PSNR) and compression ration.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.35S no.1
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• pp.114-121
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• 1998

In this paper, we introudce the notion of the smoothly perfect 8-conntected (SP8C) contour and describe a coding technique for the SP8C contours. Based on the simplificationusing the majority filter proposed by Gu, SP8C contours are restricted on the contour lattice from the segmented image. By noting thating SP8C contours are restricted to travel in only 3 different directions along the contours, we attempt to encode the SP8C contours using the following two techniques. The one is the neighbouring direction segmentcoding, while the other is to employ the notion of the entropy endoding. Computer simulations reveal that the contours can be efficiently encoded by the two technique.