Scalable Foveated Image and Video Communications

Mr. Zhou Wang

Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX

Monday, November 26th, 11:00 AM, ENS 637

zwang@mail.utexas.edu


Abstract

The Human Visual System (HVS) is highly space-variant in sampling, coding, processing and understanding. The spatial resolution of the HVS is highest around the point of fixation (foveation point) and decreases rapidly with increasing eccentricity. By taking advantage of this fact, foveated image and video processing systems remove considerable high frequency information redundancy from the peripheral regions and still reconstruct perceptually good quality images and video. Rate scalable image and video coding algorithms allow extraction of coded visual information at varying bit rates from a single compressed bitstream. This feature is especially suited for visual communications over heterogeneous, multi-user, dynamic and interactive networks such as the Internet.

This research aims to solve several key problems in the design of rate scalable foveated image and video communication systems. In these systems, the encoded bitstream is ordered, so that those bits with greater contribution in terms of a foveation-based perceptual importance measurement are encoded and transmitted first. The research work is conducted in three directions: 1) Foveated visual sensitivity modeling and wavelet-based foveated image quality assessment. 2) rate scalable foveated image coding. 3) rate scalable foveated video coding.

Biography

Zhou Wang is currently a Ph.D. candidate and Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a broad research interest including image and video processing, coding, communication and quality assessment, computer vision, wavelets, fractals, fuzzy technologies, and artificial 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