Foveated Image and Video Communications over the Internet

Mr. Zhou Wang
The University of Texas at Austin

Friday, October 6th, 9:00 AM, ENS 537

zwang1@mail.utexas.edu


Abstract

The human visual system (HVS) is highly space-variant in sampling, coding, processing and understanding visual information. The spatial resolution of the HVS is the highest around the foveation point and decreases rapidly with increasing eccentricity. By taking advantage of this fact, foveation image and video processing systems remove considerable high frequency information redundancy from the peripheral regions and still reconstruct perceptually good quality images and videos.

Rate scalable image and video coding algorithms allow extraction of coded visual information at continuously varying bit rates from a single compressed bitstream. This feature is especially suited for visual information communications over the Internet, which is a best-effort network with numerous users connected with very different and time-varying bandwidth.

The research is in the following directions:
1. Investigation and modeling of the human visual foveation features.
2. Development of the foveated rate scalable image and video coding algorithms using foveation-based HVS models.

Biography

Zhou Wang is currently a Ph.D. student at the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering, Department of ECE, The Unversity of Texas at Austin. Before he came to UT in 1998, he was a research and teaching assistant at the Department of Computer Science, City University of HongKong, HongKong, China. During the summer of 2000, he was working at Video and Image Systems, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. His research interests are in the areas of image and video coding, processing and communications, computer vision, wavelets, fractals, fuzzy techniques and neural networks.


A list of Telecommunications and Signal Processing Seminars is available at from the ECE department Web pages under "Seminars". The Web address for the Telecommunications and Signal Processing Seminars is http://signal.ece.utexas.edu/seminars