Background Modeling in Video Sequences with Application to Content-Based Movie Coding

Dr. Adriana Dumitras

Senior Video Scientist
Apple Computer, Inc.
2 Infinite Loop, MS:302-3KS
Cupertino, CA 95014, USA

Friday, November 15th, 3:00 PM, ENS 302

Abstract

Entertainment movie-on-demand and near movie-on-demand services may soon become the most important applications of movie coding. Their unquestionable success in professional and consumer markets as well as their acceptance by the movie content providers are conditioned, however, by the ability to simultaneously transmit the encoded movies efficiently and preserve a very high quality of the decoded pictures.

To meet both the bit rate and visual quality requirements, we propose encoder-only and encoder-decoder background modeling methods in movie sequences. The methods discussed in this talk employ texture removal and analysis at the encoder, texture synthesis and replacement at the decoder, and combinations of these with sprite coding methods.

Our proposed methods exploit the stylistic characteristics of high quality entertainment movie sequences in a framework where traditional object-based analysis-synthesis coding ideas converge with ideas originating from video analysis and computer graphics. In the resulting content-based coding framework, significant bit rate reduction of the compressed movie sequences, and higher visual quality of the textured background regions in the decoded movie sequences with synthesized texture than that of the regions in the sequences simply encoded and decoded have been obtained.

This work has been performed at AT&T Labs - Research, USA.

Biography

Adriana Dumitras (S'98, M'99, SM'2002) is a Senior Video Scientist with Apple Computer, CA. Prior to her joining Apple Computer, Adriana Dumitras was a Senior Technical Staff Member with AT&T Labs - Research, a Senior Assistant Professor with the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications at the "Politehnica" University of Bucharest, Romania, and held R&D positions with the National Research Council of Canada.

Her recent research work focused on content-based image and video analysis/synthesis of visual data with particular emphasis on applications such as coding of high-quality entertainment movie sequences, retrieval in image/video databases and content repurposing via subsampling. She has co-authored more than 60 journal papers, conference papers, books, book chapters, standards contributions, technical reports and pending US patents. Her current research interests are in the areas of content-based and object-based multimedia processing, and multimedia technologies.

Dr. Dumitras is a Senior Member of IEEE. She serves as a reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II, and numerous IEEE conferences. She was a Session Chair at ICIP'2001, ICIP'2002, and a Technical Committee Member at ICIP'2001, ICIP'2002, ICASSP'2002. Adriana Dumitras was the head of the Canadian delegation at ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC29/WG 11 (MPEG) from Dec. 1998 to July 1999, and a voting member of the Canadian delegation at the same organization from 1998 to 2000, contributing actively to the development of the MPEG-7 standard.

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