• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.1711-1719
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a method of the zoom motion estimation for the depth video coding. The proposed method calculates the zoom ratio using the average of the depth values in the current block and in the reference block. It resizes the reference block by the zoom ratio and interpolates the reference block to size of the current block. It compares the current block with the reference block that is obtained by subtracting the average of pixels from the current block to the reference block in order to find the reference block that is the best closest one to the current block. The results of the simulation for the proposed method show that the motion estimation errors are significantly reduced.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.765-780
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision method that determines the coding unit depth for enhancement layers to improve an encoding speed of a scalable video encoder based on HEVC. To decide the coding unit depth of the enhancement layer, firstly, the coding unit depth of the corresponded coding unit in the basement layer is employed. At this stage, the final CU depth is decided by calculating the rate-distortion costs of one lower depth to one upper depth of the referenced depth. The proposed method can reduce a computational load since it does not calculate the rate-distortion costs for all the depths of a target CU. We found that the proposed algorithm decreases encoding complexity of 26% with approximately 1.4% bit increment, compared with the simulcast encoder of the HM 4.0.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.232-235
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• 2010

This paper proposes an efficient depth-map coding method. The adaptive block-based depth-map coding method decides the number of bit planes to be encoded according to the quantization parameters to obtain the desired bit rates. So, the depth-map coding using the block-based decision of the bit-plane to be encoded proposes to free from the constraint of the quantization parameters. Simulation results show that the proposed method, in comparison with the adaptive block-based depth-map coding method, improves the average BD-rate savings by 3.5% and the average BD-PSNR gains by 0.25dB.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.237-251
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• 2016

The conventional 3D-HEVC uses the depth data of the other view instead of that of the current view because the texture data has to be encoded before the corresponding depth data of the current view has been encoded, where the depth data of the other view is used as the predicted depth for the current view. Whereas the conventional 3D-HEVC has no other candidate for the predicted depth information except for that of the other view, the scalable 3D-HEVC utilizes the depth data of the lower spatial layer whose view ID is equal to that of the current picture. The depth data of the lower spatial layer is up-scaled to the resolution of the current picture, and then the enlarged depth data is used as the predicted depth information. Because the quality of the enlarged depth is much higher than that of the depth of the other view, the proposed scheme increases the coding efficiency of the scalable 3D-HEVC codec. Computer simulation results show that the scalable 3D-HEVC is useful and the proposed scheme to use the enlarged depth data for the current picture provides the significant coding gain.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.484-492
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• 2016

The High efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the newest video coding standard that achieves coding efficiency higher than previous video coding standards such as H.264/AVC. In intra prediction, the prediction units (PUs) are derived from a large coding unit (LCU) which is partitioned into smaller coding units (CUs) sizing from 8x8 to 64x64 in a quad-tree structure. As they are divided until having the minimum depth, Optimum CU splitting is selected in RDO (Rate Distortion Optimization) process. In this process, HEVC demands high computational complexity. In this paper, to reduce the complexity of HEVC, we propose a fast CU mode decision (FCDD) for intra prediction by using FAST (Features from Accelerated Segment Test) corner detection. The proposed method reduces computational complexity with 53.73% of the computational time for the intra prediction while coding performance degradation with 0.7% BDBR is small compared to conventional HEVC.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.1762-1773
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• 2014

In this paper, a distributed image coding scheme for multi-view video through an efficient generation of side information is proposed. A distributed video coding technique corrects the errors in the side information, which is generated with the original image, by using the channel coding technique at the decoder. Therefore, the more correct the generated side information is, the better the performance of distributed video coding. The proposed technique is to apply the distributed video coding schemes to the image coding for multi-view video. It generates side information by selectively and efficiently using both 3-dimensional warping based on the depth map with spatially adjacent frames and motion-compensated temporal interpolation with temporally adjacent frames. In this scheme the difference between the adjacent frames, the sizes of the motion vectors for the adjacent blocks, and the edge information are used as the selection criteria. From the experiments, it was observed that the quality of the side information generated by the proposed technique was improved by the average peak signal-to-noise ratio of 0.97dB than the one by motion-compensated temporal interpolation or 3-dimensional warping. The result from analyzing the rate-distortion curves revealed that the proposed scheme could reduce the bit-rate by 8.01% on average at the same peak signal-to-noise ratio value, compared to previous work.

• 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.3146-3158
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• 2014

Efficient depth map coding is very crucial to the multi-view plus depth (MVD) format of 3-D video representation, as the quality of the synthesized virtual views highly depends on the accuracy of the depth map. Depth map contains smooth area within an object but distinct boundary, and these boundary areas affect the visual quality of synthesized views significantly. In this paper, we characterize the depth map by an auto-covariance analysis to show the locally anisotropic features of depth map. According to the characterization analysis, we propose an efficient depth map coding scheme, in which the directional discrete cosine transforms (DDCT) is adopted to substitute the conventional 2-D DCT to preserve the boundary information and thereby increase the quality of synthesized view. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves better performance than that of conventional DCT with respect to the bitrate savings and rendering quality.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.11-17
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose a method of correcting depth image by the plane modeling and then improving the coding performance. We model a plane by using the least squares method to the horizontal and vertical directions including the target pixel, and then determine that the predicted plane is suitable from the estimate error. After that, we correct the target pixel by the plane mode. The proposed method can correct not only the depth image composed the plane but also the complex depth image. From the simulation result that measures the entropy power, which can estimate the coding performance, we can see that the coding performance by the proposed method is improved up to 80.2%.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.2271-2288
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• 2015

The emerging high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard adopts the quadtree-structured transform unit (TU) in the residual quadtree (RQT) coding. Each TU allows to be split into four equal sub-TUs recursively. The RQT coding is performed for all the possible transform depth levels to achieve the highest coding efficiency, but it requires a very high computational complexity for HEVC encoders. In order to reduce the computational complexity requested by the RQT coding, in this paper, we propose a fast TU size decision method incorporating an adaptive maximum transform depth determination (AMTD) algorithm and a full check skipping - early termination (FCS-ET) algorithm. Because the optimal transform depth level is highly content-dependent, it is not necessary to perform the RQT coding at all transform depth levels. By the AMTD algorithm, the maximum transform depth level is determined for current treeblock to skip those transform depth levels rarely used by its spatially adjacent treeblocks. Additionally, the FCS-ET algorithm is introduced to exploit the correlations of transform depth level between four sub-CUs generated by one coding unit (CU) quadtree partitioning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed overall algorithm significantly reduces on average 21% computational complexity while maintaining almost the same rate distortion (RD) performance as the HEVC test model reference software, HM 13.0.