Group News
| 2008.06.22 |
Is there any thing left in advanced video coding? by C.-C. Jay Kuo (SAL 150 6/27/2008 1.00-2.00pm)
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Abstract There has been a significant progress in video coding techniques in the last two decades. Many standards have been established along the way, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.261, H.263 and H.264. It is fair to say that the video coding research field has reached a certain degree of maturity, and ?Is there anything left for video coding?? has been often asked. There is no easy answer to this question. There has been some preliminary effort to explore the possibility of a new video coding standard, H.265, with an objective to reduce the bit rate by 50% while keeping video quality about the same. The slow start of the H.265 standard activity reflects the difficulty of identifying major break-through video coding technologies. However, from the market viewpoint, there is still a strong driving force to reach a higher coding gain especially for high definition (HD) video content. There exist quite a few differences between HD and SD (simple definition) contents, which could be potentially exploited. Several new research directions will be pointed out in this talk. It includes: multi-view video coding, joint encoder-decoder optimization based on the context information, analysis-by-synthesis (or model-based) texture coding, new distortion measurement tools, etc. These new research directions will be discussed in this talk | |
| 2008.06.18 |
Motion recognition with Wii Remote by PeiYing Chiang (SAL 150 6/20/2008 1.00-2.00pm)
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Abstract Wii has become the most successful game product within these years;the intuitive user interaction design makes the user learn to play games easily. The motion sensor, three axes accelerometer, which is built inside of the Wii remote (Wiimote) can detect the accelerating and tilt along three dimension. With the IR sensor, the Wiimote can detect the relative translation as well. A great diversity of new game design has revealed because of the game controller revolution. There are more and more developers try to propose the innovative applications on their game or mobile device platforms with this low cost motion sensor.However, the motion sensor also has limitations which make it difficult to extend its application variety. In this prepensentation, we are going to discuss about current motion recognition technologies, motion analysis Wiimote, and how we overcome the weakness to benefit future application | |
| 2008.06.08 |
A Camera Motion-driven Visual Saliency Map Model for Videos by Shilin Xu (SAL 150 6/13/2008 1.00-2.00pm)
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Abstract Visual saliency map regards to the extraction of Region-of-Interest (ROI) from videos or images. How to automatically model the ROI for a given video is the main problem to be solved in this topic. Since each video varies from others in many basic features such as motion, texture, color, intensity, object shape, etc, it is very challenging to design a reliable computational ROI model. However, for videos, the motion plays a critical role in visual saliency map because motion can easily attract our attention and then trigger the sequential observation and tracking of HVS (Human visual system). Therefore, extracting the moving objects in the foreground is main concern of our research. Considering the camera is always moving with the shooting targets, the camera motion should be evaluated before foreground extraction. We propose a modified version of camera motion estimation algorithm and apply it to extract the foreground objects. Also, we use other methods, such as background modeling and contrast map, to form our final saliency map model. In the presentation, I will show some interesting results and propose my future work | |
| 2008.06.01 | Bit Allocation for Spatial Scalability in H.264/SVC by Jiaying (Shirley) Liu (SAL 150 6/6/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract H.264/SVC is recently standardized as a scalable extension of H.264/AVC. The production of R-D optimized bit stream is one of major objectives in the video encoder design. In this presentation, we will discuss about a model-based spatial layer bit allocation algorithm for H.264/SVC. The spatial scalability of H.264/SVC is achieved by a multi-layer approach, where an enhancement layer is bound by the dependency on its preceding layers. The inter-layer dependency is decoupled in our analysis by a careful examination of the signal flow in the encoder. We show that the rate and the distortion characteristics of a dependent layer can be represented by a number of independent functions with a group of pictures (GOP) as a basic coding unit. Finally, a low complexity spatial layer bit allocation scheme is developed using the proposed GOP-based R-D models | |
| 2008.05.30 | Seamless High-Velocity Handover Support in Mobile WiMAX Networks by Zhiwei YAN (SAL 150 5/30/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract The IEEE 802.16e standard (mobile WiMAX) has been proposed to provide connectivity to wireless networks for mobile users (including users at the vehicular speed). It is first shown in our analysis that the handover successful probability decreases significantly when the user moves at a higher speed. Then, we propose the use of the forward error correction (FEC) to offer extra protection of handover signaling messages to enhance the handover successful probability, especially at a higher velocity. Moreover, an adaptive FEC scheme can be adopted to achieve a target handover successful probability at various velocities. It is demonstrated by simulation results that the proposed FEC scheme achieves the target handover successful probability efficiently | |
| 2008.05.15 | Congratulations to Gracia Wang for passing her Qual exam! |
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Congratulations to Gracia Wang for passing her Qual exam today. The title of her thesis proposal is: "Robust Video Transmission in Erasure Networks with Network Coding". Her thesis committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chair), Zhen Zhang, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Panayiotis Georgiou and Cyrus Shahabi (Outside Member) | |
| 2008.05.12 | Congratulations to Wesley Lee for passing her Defense exam! |
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Congratulations to Wesley Lee for passing his defense today. His PhD thesis title is "H.264/AVC Decoder Complexity Modeling and Its Applications". His thesis guidance committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chair), Mihaela van der Schaar and Tu-Nan Chang | |
| 2008.05.06 | Fast Duplicate Video Detection Using Suffix Array Data Structure by Ping-Hao Wu (ZHS 163 5/9/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract We propose a fast duplicate video detection system using the suffix array data structure in this work. To achieve this objective, we first develop a compact one-dimensional signature based on the underlying video structure, which is discriminative yet insensitive to various attacks. Unlike images and audio, the size of videos is usually very large, which makes it computationally expensive to match two very long signature sequences. Being motivated by the genome sequence alignment, we adopt an efficient matching technique using the suffix array data structure. The proposed system can perform the sequence matching in linear time while the complexity of conventional duplicate video copy detection algorithms grows at least quadratically with the video length | |
| 2008.04.30 | Robust Multimedia Transmission in Erasure Network with Network Coding by Gracia Wang (ZHS 163 5/2/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract Network coding techniques have been proposed for efficient data multicast over networks. Practical network coding adopts random linear network coding method which combines a group of packets by randomly selecting the coefficient on a finite field in a distributed way. However, the loss of one random linear encoded packet means the lost of a dimension for the constrained equations in decoding. Unless global network coding matrix is of full rank, we are not able to recover all source packets by error concealment. Specifically, we have addressed two significant topics: 1) Construct a sparse global coding matrix for layered H.264/SVC (scalable video coding) bit-stream transmission and maintain the shape of the sparse matrix through the random linear network coding process. The graceful quality degradation is achieved by partial decoding of the received data block. 2) Propose an interleaving scheme to enable network coding and error concealment cooperating effectively. Moreover, the unequal erasure protection bed on the scheme achieves the smooth quality degradation | |
| 2008.04.20 | Synthesis-based texture coding for video compression by Byung Tae (ZHS 163 4/25/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract The synthesis-based texture coding technique is investigated in this talk to improve the coding efficiency of the current video coding standard. First, e will breifly introduce the current texture synthesis techniques and synthesis-based texture coding method. Next, a synthesis-based texture coding technique that uses low-quality video as the side information to control the output texture for video coding is proposed. Furthermore, an area-adaptive side information assignment scheme is developed to improve coding efficiency. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed technique, we study a quantitative quality measure for the synthesized texture, which even provides an explicit criterion whether the input texture is synthesizable. Computer simulation results are given to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed technique | |
| 2008.04.14 | Rate control of H.264/SVC by Yongjin Cho (ZHS 163 4/16/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract H.264/SVC is recently standardized as a scalable extension of H.264/AVC. The production of an R-D optimized bit stream is one of the major objectives in the video encoder design. In this presentation, we will discuss about a model based temporal layer bit allocation scheme as a solution to the R-D optimal video encoding problem. We have three parts in the presentation. In the first part, we provide a brief overview of H.264/SVC along with possible research issues and major challenges. A dependent distortion model is proposed in the second part. In the R-D modeling of video signals, the inter-layer dependency is one of the major obstacles. With the proposed distortion model, the dependency issue could be resolved successfully. Finally, in the third part, we introduce a temporal layer bit allocation scheme as an application of the distortion model | |
| 2008.04.09 | Congratulations to Byung Tae for passing his Qual exam! |
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Congratulations to Byung Tae for passing his Qual exam today. His thesis proposal title is "Synthesis-based Texture Coding for Video Compression". His thesis guidance committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chair), Sanjit Mitra, Jerry Mendel, Krishna Nayak and Ulrich Neumann (Outside Member) | |
| 2008.04.09 | Multi-carrier Collusion-Resistant Code (Robust Fingerprinting) by Joohyun (Peter) Cho (ZHS 163 4/11/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract The collusion-resistant fingerprinting system for traitor tracing applications using a multi-carrier approach is described in this talk. One key issue in the fingerprinting system design is its robustness against the collusion attack. We focus on time-invariant and time-variant collusion attacks depending on the variations of colluder weights. Collusion-resistance can be achieved by choosing Hadamard-Walsh (HW) spreading codes followed by the multi-carrier modulation. For this reason, our hiding codes are called multi-carrier collusion-resistant codes (MCRC). Based on our recent development of fingerprinting system, we design and analyze the MCRC system against the time-invariant and time-variant colluder weights. For time-invariant colluder weights, we propose a colluder detection scheme with advanced user detectors to identify a larger number of colluders in weighted collusion attacks. The task of advanced user detection and colluder weight estimation can be formulated as a single-user and multi-user detection problem aided by channel estimation module from communication system. Based on multi-carrier code division multiaccess (MC-CDMA) system, our advanced detection scheme includes the maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme for single-user detection in the same group and the parallel interference cancellation (PIC) multiuser detection scheme for multi-user detection in different groups. For time-variant colluder weights, the allocation schemes of pilot symbols and user codes with repetition coding are proposed, which are named as space-time spreading (STS) MCRC. The STS MCRC system allocates pilot symbols and user codes with repetition into the entire time or space of multimedia, and the system can be robust against the variations of colluder weights | |
| 2008.04.03 | Trust Without Privacy: Security Considerations in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) by Joyce Liang (ZHS 163 4/4/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract The next generation of wireless communications will emphasize the rapid deployment of networks that enable survivable, efficient, and dynamic communications, i.e. mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). MANETs find particular relevance in military applications, as many governments shift towards a policy of cooperative communications in an infrastructureless, coalition environment. However, because the limited transmission range requires multiple hops in the path, each node in a MANET must act as source, intermediate, and receiver node. Network Coding (NC) has been shown as an attractive alternative to classical routing to achieve increased throughput, yet because of the open medium, it is still vulnerable to internal eavesdroppers. The tradeoff between security and efficiency can be jointly considered in the concept of trust. We suggest a model for the calculation of trust between heterogeneous nodes, which can be used for achieving information security when combined with NC in a wireless MANET | |
| 2008.04.03 | Game Theory and its applications on wireless network by Joohyun (Peter) Cho (ZHS 163 4/4/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract Game Theory is a mathematical tool developed to understand competitive situations in which rational decision makers interact to achieve their objectives. Since the distinguished paper "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, game theory has been mainly studied and developed in economics. However, its characteristic, providing a mathematical tool for analyzing strategic situation, makes its applications more expanded into various areas such as biology, computer science, politics, and philosophy. In addition, game theory techniques have recently have been applied to various engineering design problems in which the action of one component impact (and perhaps conflicts with) that of any other component. In particular, game theory techniques have been successfully used for protocol design and optimization (e.g. radio resource management, power control) in wireless networks. In this presentation, I introduce game theory concepts with some examples and shortly state a survey on the game theory based resource management and admission control schemes in different wireless networks and several open research issues are outlined. Then game theory application on cognitive radio is presented | |
| 2008.03.13 | Relay-Assisted Decorrelating Multiuser Detector (RAD-MUD) for Cooperative CDMA Networks by Wan-Jen (Athena) Huang (ZHS 163 3/14/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract In this talk, we consider the uplink of a cooperative CDMA network, where users cooperate by relaying each other's messages to the base station. When spreading waveforms are not orthogonal, multiple access interference (MAI) exists at the relays and the destination, causing cooperative diversity gains to diminish. To address this problem, we propose the relay-assisted decorrelating multiuser detector (RAD-MUD) to separate interfering signals at the destination with the help of precoding at relays along with pre-whitening at the destination. Unlike the conventional zero-forcing (ZF)precoder or the decorrelating MUD, the proposed RAD-MUD experiences neither power expansion at the relays nor noise amplification at the destination. Three cooperative transmission strategies are considered on top of RAD-MUD;namely, transmit beamforming, selective relaying and distributed space-time coding. Since the reliability of each source-relay and/or relay-destination links are different,relay transmissions are weighted accordingly in our schemes to further combat MAI.The advantages of RAD-MUD over existing cooperative MUD schemes are verified by computer simulation | |
| 2008.03.05 | Motion Synthesis with Wavelet-based Heterogeneous Motion Graph by May-chen Kuo (ZHS 163 3/7/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract Heterogeneous Motion Graph (HMG) contains heterogeneous nodes and links. Each node is characterized by the wavelet transformed representation of a group of similar motion of a limb. A directed transitable link connects one node to another if they are transitable. A compatibility link connects two nodes if their associated limbs can be joined together. A walk in the graph along the compatibility links through nodes of different tiers leads to a pose. New poses which do not exist in the original database can be synthesized by HMG, and so can the new transitions. The feasibility of the synthesized poses and the related motion are verified with rules defined in bio-mechanical literatur | |
| 2008.02.27 | HHT-based multipitch analysis in polyphonic music by EnShuo (Sphinx) Tsau (ZHS 163 2/29/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract Multiple fundamental frequency tracking has always been tough in musical information retrieval task. Unlike conventional approach, we try to utilized HHT as a tool to develop a robust detection scheme in polyphonic case. HHT was first introduced by Dr. Huang in 1998 using the principle of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and the Hilbert transform. The EMD process conducts a nonlinear approach to first decompose the signal into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), which provide multi-scale in time domain. HHT is successful in dealing with non-stationary and non-linear data and has been applied to several area like mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering. It has several benefit like no time-frequency resolution trade-off comparing to Fourier Transform, better visualization. However, it still has several constrains for newly development. In the presentation, first I will introduce HHT including its insight, pros and cons. Second, i will discuss multipitch analysis in polyphonic music, the convention method, the challenge and the links with HHT. Several experiments will be provided. Finally i will make a conclusion and future work | |
| 2008.02.22 | Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) for Digital Watermarking by SeongHo (Steve) Cho (ZHS 163 2/22/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract Many information-embedding algorithms like low-bit(s) modulation (LBM) method and additive spread-spectrum-based method have been proposed in the past. However, both LBM-type strategies and additive spread spectrum (SS) are, in general, not good choices for most information embedding and digital watermarking applications. A new class of information-embedding strategies called ¡§Quantization Index Modulation¡¨ (QIM) has been proved to be robust against arbitrary bounded and fully informed attacks, which arise in several copyright applications. In particular, QIM is proven to achieve provably better rate distortion¡Vrobustness tradeoffs than currently popular spread-spectrum and low-bit(s) modulation methods. Before talking about QIM, I will give general background of digital rights management (DRM) and watermarking. After these general concepts, I will compare several information embedding methods (LBM, SS, QIM) for watermarking and their examples. QIM will be explained with detailed implementation example. Several extension of QIM like distortion-compensated QIM (DC-QIM) and spread transform dither modulation (STDM) will also be discussed. Finally, application of QIM to video watermarking will be considered | |
| 2008.02.12 | Variational approach and its applications by Jonghye Woo (ZHS 163 2/15/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract We can interprete same phenomonen with different point of view such as analytic or statistical framework. Each framework has its strengths and weaknesses and can be applid to the different applications. Variational approach is widely used technique in the image processing and computer vision area such as image denoising, segmentation, registration, various inverse problems and super-resolution. A non-rigid ultrasound image registration method is proposed in this work using the intensity as well as the local phase information under a variational framework. One application of this technique is to register two consecutive images in an ultrasound image sequence. Although intensity is the most widely used feature in traditional ultrasound image registration algorithms, speckle noise and lower image resolution make the registration process difficult. By integrating the intensity and the local phase information, we can find and track the non-rigid transformation of each pixel under diffeomorphism between the source and target images. Experiments using synthetic and in vivo mice cardiac images are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method | |
| 2008.02.07 | Group seminar: DNA sequence assembly with short fragments by Sungje Cho (ZHS 163 2/8/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract After Sanger and Gilbert invented a DNA sequencing method, there was great development to sequence DNA, assemble it, and analyze the human DNA sequence. Though there were many researches about DNA sequencing methods, it costs too much yet. First human DNA sequence was sequenced with $3 billion, and today it costs several million dollars. But our goal is $1,000 genome for each person. Nowadays, to achieve this goal, we are focusing on high throughput sequencer which produces sequences very fast, but produces very short fragments. It means that the high throughput sequencer will reduce the cost of sequencing, but it makes assembler too difficult to assemble those fragments. Recently proposed idea is Eulerian path (or equivalently cycle) method to conquer this. Eulerian path finding problem is historically very old problem. It was suggested to help Sequence by Hybridization (SBH) sequencing method first in sequence assembly area. After that, SBH technology was disappeared without practical application. But as the fragment size is getting shorter, Eulerian path approach is re-visiting to assemble with very short fragments. I will shortly state the history of DNA sequencing, and propose our idea in this talk | |
| 2008.02.07 | Congratulations to Byung-Ho (Paul) Cha for passing his Qual exam! |
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Congratulations to Byung-Ho (Paul) Cha for passing his Qual exam (1/29/2008). His thesis proposal is entitled with "Design of Collusion-Resistant Fingerprinting Systems with a Multicarrier Approach". His thesis guidance committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chairperson), Sanjit K. Mitra, Shri Narayanan, Richard Leahy and Ming-Deh Huang (Outside Member) | |
| 2008.01.28 | Congratulations to Namgook Cho for passing his Qual exam! |
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Congratulations to Namgook Cho for passing his Qual exam 1/28/2007. The title of his thesis proposal is "Theory and Applications of Efficient Musical Signal Representation". His thesis committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chairperson), Jerry Mendel, Richard Leahy, Shri Narayanan and Liang Chen (Outside Member) | |
| 2008.01.28 | Group seminar: Disparity Estimation from Multi-View Images and Video: Graph Models and Algorithms by Jong Dae Oh (ZHS 163 2/1/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract In this work, we consider the problem of estimating the depth information from the following three scenarios: a stereo image pair, multi-view images, and stereo image sequences. For stereo image matching, we first propose a new disparity map estimation algorithm for slant and curved surfaces. In this situation, we focus on two properties of the disparity map. The first one is continuous disparity change inside an object while the second one is sharp disparity change between object boundaries. To exploit these two properties at the same time, two techniques are proposed to improve the performance of existing stereo matching algorithms. To address disparity discontinuity in object boundaries, we present a disparity estimation procedure, which consists of two steps: a greedy disparity filling algorithm and a least-squared-errors (LSE) fitting method. Furthermore, it is observed that the existing fronto-parallel model with color segmentation is built upon the piecewise constant surface approximation. This is however not efficient in approximating slanted or curved objects. We propose to use a piecewise linear surface model to represent 3-dimensional (3D) geometric structure for better surface modeling. The proposed stereo matching system with these two new components is evaluated with Middlebury data sets with excellent quantitative and qualitative results. Then, a new graph model for disparity estimation of multi-view images is investigated. Two performance metrics for algorithmic evaluation are considered. They are quality and complexity. To reduce complexity, a graph model whose computational time is independent of the number of input images is proposed. With this model, new smoothness and consistency terms in the energy function are added to maintain the quality of a disparity map. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm offers good enough quality at a much lower complexity than existing methods. To further improve the quality of the disparity map in stereo matching, we propose an advanced framework based on new graph models. Along this direction, we divide stereo matching problem into 3 sub-problems: 1) disparity estimation for non-occlusion regions and occlusion detection, 2) disparity estimation for occlusion regions, and 3) post-processing of the disparity map. A three-step procedure is proposed to solve them sequentially. At the first step, we perform an initial matching and develop a new graph model using the ordering constraint to improve disparity values in non-occlusion regions and detect occlusion regions. At the second step, we determine disparity values in occlusion regions based on global optimization. Since the conventional segmentation-based stereo matching is not efficient in highly slanted or curved objects, we propose a post-processing technique for disparity map enhancement based on a 3-dimensional (3-D) geometric structure. The proposed three-step stereo matching procedure yields excellent quantitative and qualitative results with Middlebury data sets. Finally, disparity estimation and virtual view synthesis from stereo video inputs are examined. To enhance the overall performance, a two-stage algorithm for accurate and fast disparity estimation and occlusion handling is first presented. Then, a new virtual view synthesis method with a preprocessing algorithm is described. The preprocessing algorithm can remove false matched regions for disparity refinement effectively. This synthesis method can reduce the blurring and ghostly effects and provides an excellent tradeoff in terms of computational time and synthesized video quality | |
| 2008.01.25 | Congratulations to Wan-Jen (Athena) Huang for passing his defense! |
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Congratulations to Wan-Jen (Athena) Huang for passing his defense on 1/23/2008. Athena's thesis title is "Design and Analysis of High-Performance Cooperative Relay Networks". Her thesis guidance committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chairperson), Michael Neely, Xiaoli Yu and Fengzhu Sun (Outside Member) | |
| 2008.01.25 | Group seminar: Error concealment in scalable video coding (SVC) by Tanaphol Thaipanich (ZHS 163 1/25/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: H.264/SVC (Scalable Video Coding) is recently emerging standard. It allows a much more flexible bit-steam which is highly adaptable to bandwidth and hardware restriction. It has a decent coding efficiency via a development of H.264. However, as of now, there is very little research study on error concealment algorithm in SVC and most of current error concealment algorithms are not designed to exploit new features offered in SVC. Additionally, some concepts of available EC algorithms might not be able to function well in SVC without modification. In this week presentation, I will start my talk with a general overview of error concealment concept and introduction to SVC. After that we will discuss with related works and some of my experiment results so that we can have a better understanding of the subject matter. Then, I will present my current work and our progress. The conclusion will be given at the end to summary my researches | |
| 2008.01.17 | Group seminar: Improved Coding Scheme with Enlarged Block Size on High Definition Video Contents by Qi Zhang (ZHS 163 1/18/2008 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: High definition video content is one of the most important consumer electronics trends developed in the past several years. High definition video content has several unique characteristics comparing to previous standard video content. First is the content fidelity. Very fine details needs to be faithfully reproduced in order to satisfy costumer demand. Second, the resolution is typically much larger than standard size video. The current HD resolution is about 1920x1080, even higher resolution is being introduced into the market such as the upcoming digital cimena 2K and 4K standard. Studies on HD contents point out that due to the increased resolution, the average block texture complexity is often much simpler than that of the standard definition (SD) contents such as the CIF resolution.Therefore, previous researches proposed to use larger macroblock size to provide better coding performance. However, experiment results show that the coding gain from using larger macroblock size is unstable amongst sequences with different complexity. In addition, coding gain from larger block size diminishes as the quantization parameter decreases. In this paper, we will provide a systematic analysis on the unique characteristics of HD contents. We identified the two major issues that prohibit efficient coding using larger block size on HD contents are film grain noise and gradient change. To combat these problems, we propose a pyramid based encoding scheme combined with fractal based solutions to enable the use of larger macroblock size. Experimental results will be given to show the effectiveness of our algorithm | |
| 2007.12.04 | Group seminar: Content-based Video Copy Detection by Ping-hao Wu (WPH 207 12/7/2007 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: With the proliferation of digital video content on the internet and broadcasting, how to detect duplicate videos becomes a critical issue. Unlike watermarking, which inserts a distinct pattern into the video, video copy detection relies on the content-based signatures of the videos. The main challenges are the robustness of the features extracted and the massive capacity of video sources. In this presentation, I will begin by introducing the general concept of video copy detection and reviewing several existing methods. By relating the video matching problem to the sequence alignment problem, an approach that can quickly scan through a large video database to find duplicate of a given query video will be presented. Experiment results of testing several query videos against an 100 hour database will be given. Then I will conclude by discussing the plan for future works | |
| 2007.12.04 | Congratulations to Bei Wang for passing his defense! |
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Congratulations to Bei Wang for passing his defense on 12/4/2007. Her thesis title is "Techniques for Efficient Cloud Modeling, Simulation and Rendering". Her thesis committee consists of Jay Kuo (Chair), Krishna Nayak and Ulrich Neumann (Outside Member) | |
| 2007.11.15 | Congratulations to Chia-Chun Hsu (Alex) for passing his defense! |
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Congratulations to Chia-Chun Hsu (Alex) for passing his defense on 11/13/2007. His PhD thesis topic is "Coexistence Mechanisms for Legacy and Next Generation Wireless Networks Protocols".His Thesis Committee includes C.-C. Jay Kuo (Chair), Michael Neely and Ramesh Govindan (Outside Member) | |
| 2007.11.13 | Group seminar: Novel Intra Prediction Techniques for HD Content Coding by Yunyang Dai (WPH 207 11/16/2007 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: With the evolution of digital consumer electronics and the increased capacity of network infrastructure, consumers are no longer satisfied with contents of coarse quality and limited resolution. Today?s sophisticated consumer increasingly demands high quality contents. Fidelity has become one of the main concerns regarding digital content delivery. There have been different attempts from both academic and industry community to support the rising demand for higher resolution with better visual quality. For example, JPEG2000 and H.264 all intra coding were incorporated in DCI for better coding quality and individual frame accessibility. Although the current intra prediction techniques used in H.264 is very efficient and shows some ability to capture the surface structure of the predicted image block, the residual image block still shows regular structures after the spatial prediction. In this talk, we will first present a novel intra prediction for high definition video coding. Different from the traditional line prediction techniques, we use 2D surface based prediction to further enhance the prediction quality. Experiment results will be presented to show the effectiveness of our algorithm. We will then present additional enhancements in fractal dimensions that allow further performance gain | |
| 2007.11.01 | Seminar: Paradigm Shifts in Modern IT Era Driven by Digital Media and Broadband Networks by Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo (WPH 207 11/2/2007 2.00-3.00pm) |
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Information technologies have become more mature after its quick development for almost half a century. We are in a new era in which IT research has shifted its focus from technology development to novel applications. For example, digital technologies have been widely applied to speech, audio, video and graphics in various commercial applications today. Furthermore, the availability of broadband wired/wireless Internet infrastructures and new technologies such as peer-to-peer networking has changed the way of digital media distribution and exchange. This lecture will address the following four major IT paradigm shifts: - From the analog implementation to the digital implementation - From PC-centric to network-centric - From one-way broadcasting to two-way interaction - From HW/SW/infra-structure provision to contents and value-added service | |
| 2007.10.26 | Seminar: Overview of SIGINT Operations and Research Opportunities by Bill Nead (EEB 248 10/26/2007 2.00-3.00pm) |
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Abstract: The main purpose of this talk is to optimize university research and assist with establishing an academic outreach program to best support the war fighters' needs on preparing the Battle space, Multi-INT collection management, processing techniques, and reporting. Visit introduction will include a detailed overview of the Intelligence Community as it relates to Multi-INT operations and how SIGINT Operations play a critical role | |
| 2007.10.24 | Group seminar: Background Modeling for Acoustic Environments by Selina Chu (WPH 207 10/26/2007 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: Detecting foreground events from background audio in an environment is an important problem in an automatic acoustic scene recognition system. Background modeling is aimed at discriminating the expected information, namely the background from the unexpected events, i.e., the foreground. In general, most of the work in this area has been at the visual level. However, using vision alone has its limitation. Audio data could be obtained at any moment when the system is functioning, in spite of challenging external conditions such as poor lighting or visual obstruction, and is relatively cheap to store and compute compared to visual signals. Since other modality information are easily available (e.g., audio), it could effectively be used to discover unusual ¡§activity pattern¡¨ in a scene. I will begin by presenting a brief introduction on background modeling and a review of the different proposed methods. We conclude by discussing the applicability of these works to environmenta | |
| 2007.10.17 | Group seminar: Instrument Recognition in Monophonic and Polyphonic Music by Wanchi Lee (WPH 207 10/19/2007 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: In this presentation, recently developed techniques in music instrument recognition as well as our improvement to the existing system will be introduced. Musical content analysis plays a key role in the musical information retrieval (MIR) system. In particular, musical instrument recognition provides useful information for automatic music transcription and music database indexing. Therefore, this problem has received a growing interest in recent years. Early researchers focused on the classification of isolated musical notes. The results of these early research fail to extend to real world problem since the audio features they used cannot be found in continuous musical instrument performance. Later, a more realistic application, which tries to identify the solo instrument played in continuous monophonic excerpt, draws more attention. Several recent research reported high correction rate on classification of some instruments, which is achieved by well-designed audio features and sophisticated feature selection techniques. More recently, instrument recognition in polyphonic has also started to be considered in some research, but the performance is still far from satisfactory. In the last part of the talk, our advance in this topic will be presented, which include using onset detection to assist the recognition. It will be shown that proper preprocessing and segmentation of music will facilitate the following classification tasks | |
| 2007.10.09 | Group seminar: Efficient Music Representation with Content Adaptive Dictionaries by Namgook Cho (WPH 207 10/12/2007 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: An efficient music representation based on the matching pursuit (MP) technique with content adaptive dictionaries (CADs) will be discussed in the presentation. The Gabor atoms are commonly adopted in the MP-based signal representation due to their excellent time-frequency localization property. However, the Gabor dictionary may not yield a concise representation for music signals. Music signals have special characteristics as they are generated by musical instruments and/or human vocal tracks with musical rules and they are specified by pitches and durations of music notes. We exploit music characteristics to create content-adaptive dictionaries (CADs) that are tailored to instrument types and note pitch levels. As a result, we are able to project musical signals onto a subspace spanned by atoms from CAD for a concise and efficient representation. The proposed CAD representation technique is applied to music enhancement with noisy background to demonstrate the power of the proposed representation | |
| 2007.10.01 | Group seminar: Hierarchical Cloud Simulation based on Similarity Approach by Bei Wang (WPH 207 10/5/2007 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: Cloud is attractive to peoples since it provides more realistic outdoor scenes. However, due to its amorphous shape, it is difficult to model and render in computer graphics field. For this kind of physical based problem, there are generally two kind of methods to do the modeling, one is the CFD which got to solve bunch of PDE equations, this method can generate astonishing result however computation cost is big. Another method is called procedural method, which is use noise function to generate the amorphous character, but their flexibility and extension is limited. In my talk, I am going to provided an efficient simulation method to achieve cloud simulation,especially the cumulus cloud simulation which is driven by convection. In atmospheric science, thermal is studied as a basic flow unit for cloud simulation, whose dynamic property can be described by similarity approach; however, this is not enough for computer graphics for visual details, thus inner motion of thermal will be introduced, Votex particle method for axis-symmetric flow will be presented | |
| 2007.09.25 | Group seminar: Realistic Fluid Simulation by Youngmin Kwak (WPH 207 9/28/2007 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: Special effects (SFX) are used in many areas such as film, television, and game to realize realistic and dramatic scenes which are not possible by normal means. Fluid simulation is the core of SFX and includes liquid, smoke, and bubble simulations. Navier-Stokes equations (NSEs) are non-linear partial differential equations (PDEs) which describe the movement of fluids. The fast and visually accurate solution of those equations is the goal of fluid simulation in computer graphics area. Particle level set (PLS) method and advanced PLS will be introduced during the semina | |
| 2007.09.18 | Group seminar: Gesture recognition with Wii Remote by Pei-ying Chiang (WPH 207 9/21/2007 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: A new revolution in game industry is coming in the wake of Wii's succeed. Previously, pursing high quality 3D animation was the main battleground in the gaming industry. However, the population of gamers has stagnated because most games were designed more and more complex. It would take a significant amount of time for a casual gamer to learn and memorize how to control and interact with the game. However, the innovation of Wii brings back the idea of "playing a game is simply for having fun". Moving your body exactly like what you want to do in the game, makes the game controls more straight forward and intuitive. In this presentation, I am going to talk about why Wii is so successful, what is the secret weapon of Wii? What are the weaknesses of Wii? How can we overcome these weaknesses to benefit future gaming applications | |
| 2007.09.18 | Congratulations to Szu-Wei (Wesley) Lee for passing his Qualifying exam! |
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Congratulations to Szu-Wei (Wesley) Lee for passing his Qual on 9/11/2007 | |
| 2007.09.12 | Group seminar: Robust Multimedia Multicast with Network Coding by Gracia Wang (WPH 207 9/14/2007 1.00-2.00pm) |
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Abstract: There are several challenges of multimedia multicast and streaming. One is packet loss which is mainly due to network traffic congestion. The second is the heterogeneous receivers. The third is dynamic construction of the multicast tree architecture. Previous research focuses on coding methods such as Application Layer FEC (AL-FEC) to provide redundant packet for erasure correction, and complicated algorithms to construct path-disjoint multicast trees to provide path redundancy. In this presentation, a robust and efficient joint Network Coding (NC) and AL-FEC architecture is proposed. Benefiting from network coding which can achieves optimal multicast rate, the proposed multicast architecture results in better erasure protection compared with AL-FEC. Moreover, it simplifies the multicast tree construction and maintenance. Simulation with unequal protected H.264/SVC bit-stream shows that joint NC/AL-FEC obtains better PSNR for heterogeneous receivers than AL-FEC in erasure network | |
| 2007.09.11 | Congratulations to Jiansong (Jason) Chen for passing his Qualifying exam! |
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Congratulations to Jiansong (Jason) Chen for passing his Qual on 9/10/2007. His thesis proposal title is "Robust V-BLAST Receiver Design and Performance Analysis for MIMO Communication Systems". His thesis Guidance committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chair), Xiaoli Yu (Co-Chair), Charles Weber, Giuseppe Caire and Ming-Deh Huang (Outside Member) | |
| 2007.09.05 | Congratulations to Yu-Hao (Roger) Chang for passing his defense! |
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Congratulations to Yu-Hao (Roger) Chang for passing his defense today (9/5/07). Roger's thesis title is "Preconditioning Techniques for Efficient Ultra-Wideband (UWB) Communication Systems." His PhD dissertation committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chairman), Xiaoli Yu and Wlodek Proskurowski (Outside Member) | |
| 2007.09.04 | Congratulations to Ilya Eckstein for passing his defense! |
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Congratulations to Ilya Eckstein for passing his defense today (9/4/2007). His thesis title is "Correspondence-based Analysis of 3D Deformable Shapes: Methods and Applications". His thesis committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chairman), Mathieu Desbrun, Gerard Medioni and Richard Leahy (Outside Member) | |
| 2007.09.04 | Congratulations to Kelvin Chou for passing his defense! |
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Congratulations to Kelvin Chou for passing his defense today (9/4/2007). His thesis title is "Techniques for Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution over Mobile Ad Hoc Networks". His thesis committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chairman), Konstantinos Psounis and XiaoJiang Chen (Outside Member) | |
| 2007.08.20 | Jay Kuo Receives 2007 Okawa Foundation Research Grant |
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Jay Kuo is a recipient of a 2007 Research Grant from the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications. The Okawa Foundation was established in Japan in 1986 to provide funding for and give recognition to new studies in the information and telecommunications fields. The Okawa Research Grant will be formally presented at a ceremony in San Francisco in October 2007Related links: | |
| 2007.08.20 | Congratulations to Yu Shiu for his successful PhD thesis defense! |
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Congratulations to Yu (Shiu) for passing his defense on 8/20! His thesis title is "Digital Signal Processing Techniques for Music Structure Analysis". His final dissertation committee members are: Jay Kuo (Chair), Shri Narayanan and Elaine Chew | |
| 2007.05.01 | Congratulations to Ronald for his passing the Qualifying exam |
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Congratulations to Ronald for passing his Qual on 5/1 (Tuesday). The title of his thesis proposal is "Protocol Design and Performance Analysis for Opportunistic OFDM/OFDMA QoS Networks". His Guidance Committee includes: C.-C. Jay Kuo (Chair), Antonio Ortega, Michael Nealy, Zhen Zhang and Ramesh Govindan (Outside Member) | |
| 2007.04.23 | Congratulations to Usman for his passing the Qualifying exam |
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Congratulations to Usman for his passing the Qual exam on 4/23/2007. His thesis proposal title is "Ultra-Wide Band Impulse Radio with Super-Orthogonal Turbo Codes". His committee members include: C.-C. Jay Kuo (Chair), Jerry M. Mendel, Charles L. Weber, Xiaoli Yu and Remigijus Mikulevicius (Outside member). He did an excellent presentation which has impressed the committee members a lot | |
| 2007.04.03 | Congratulations to Athena for her passing the Qualifying exam |
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Congratulations to Athena for her passing the Qual exam (4/3/2007). The title of Athena's thesis proposal is "Design and analysis of high-performance cooperative relay networks". Her Guidance Committee Members include Professors Keith M. Chugg, Michael Neely, Xiaoli Yu, Fengzhu Sun and Jay Kuo (Chair) | |
| 2007.02.08 | Congratulations to Pei-Kai Liao for his successful PhD thesis defense! |
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Congratulations to Pei-Kai Liao for his successful passing the PhD thesis defense on 2/8 (Thursday). The title of his PhD thesis is ¡§Distributed Edge and Contour Line Detection for Environmental Monitoring with Wireless Sensor Networks¡¨ and his dissertation committee members are Professors Antonio Ortega, Ramesh Govindan and Jay Kuo (Chair) | |
| 2007.01.24 | Congratulations to Layla for her passing the Qualifying exam |
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Congratulations to Layla Tadjpour for her passing the Qual exam (1/24/2007). The title of Layla's thesis proposal is "Performance Improvement and Analysis of Multiaccess OFDM Transceivers in Mobile Environments". Her Guidance Committee Members include Professors Xiaoli Yu, Charles Weber, Keith Jenkins, Igor Kukavica and Jay Kuo (Chair) | |
| 2007.01.22 | Congratulations to Alex for his passing the Qualifying exam |
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Congratulations to Alex Chia-Chun Hsu for his passing the Qual exam (1/22/2007). The title of Alex's thesis proposal is "Coexistence Mechanisms for Existing and Next Generation Unlicensed Band Protocols". His Guidance Committee Members include Professors Antonio Ortega, Michael J. Neely, Leana Golubchik, Ramesh Govindan and Jay Kuo (Chair) | |
| 2006.12.06 | Congratulations to Bei for her passing the Qualifying exam |
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Congratulations to Bei for her passing the Qual exam today (12/6/2006). Her thesis proposal title is "Techniques for Efficient Cloud Modeling, Simulation and Rendering". Her Guidance Committee includes Jay Kuo (Chair), Richard Leahy, Keith Jenkins, Krishna Nayak and Karen Liu (Outside Member) | |
| 2006.11.28 | Congratulations to Jae-Joon Lee for his successful PhD thesis defense! |
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Congratulations to Jae-Joon Lee for his successful passing the PhD thesis defense on 11/28 (Tuesday). Jae-Joon¡¦s Thesis title is "Aging Analysis in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks¡¨ and his final thesis committee includes Professor Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Professor Gaurav Sukhatme and Jay Kuo (Chair) | |
| 2006.11.20 | Congratulations to Kelvin for his passing the Qualifying exam |
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Congratulations to Kelvin for his passing the Qualifying exam on 11/20 (Monday). Kelvin\¡¦s thesis proposal title is "Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution Systems over Mobile Ad Hoc Networks¡¨ and his Qual exam committee members include Kai Hwang, Antonio Ortega, Konstantinos Psounis, Xiaojiang Chen (Outside Member) and Jay Kuo (Chair) | |
| 2006.10.19 | Congratulations to Amy for her successful PhD thesis defense! |
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Congratulations to Ming-Sui (Amy) Lee for passing her PhD thesis defense in the morning of 10/19 (Thursday). Her PhD thesis title is ¡§Low Complexity Mosaicking and Up-Sampling Techniques for High Resolution Video Display¡¨. Her PhD thesis guidance committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chair), Shri Narayanan, Roger Zimmermann and Ulrich Neumann (Outside Member) | |
| 2006.10.18 | Congratulations to Do-Kyoung for his successful PhD thesis defense! |
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Congratulations to Do-Kyoung Kwon for passing his defense in the afternoon of 10/18 (Wed). Do-Kyoung¡¦s thesis topic is ¡§Rate Control Techniques for H.264/AVC Video with Enhanced Rate-Distortion Modeling¡¨. His PhD thesis guidance committee includes Jay Kuo (Chair), Antonio Ortega and Ulrich Neumann (Outside Member) | |
| 2006.10.18 | Congratulations to Yu for her successful PhD thesis defense! |
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Congratulations to Yu Hu for passing her defense in the morning of 10/18 (Wed). Yu¡¦s thesis topic is ¡§Power-Efficient Multimedia Applications on Embedded Systems¡¨. Her PhD thesis guidance committee includes Jay Kuo (Chair), Kai Hwang and Roger Zimmermann (Outside Member) | |
| 2006.10.11 | Congratulations to Fu-Hsuan for his successful PhD thesis defense! |
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Congratulations to Fu-Hsuan for passing his PhD thesis defense on 10/11. His thesis title is "Performance Analysis and Transceiver Design for Adaptive Bit-Interleaved MIMO-OFDM Systems". His PhD thesis guidance committee includes: Professor Jay Kuo (Chair), Professor Chuck Weber and Professor Ting Chen (Outside Member) | |
| 2006.10.09 | Congratulations to Hua Yang for her successful PhD thesis defense! |
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Congratulations to Hua Yang for her successful PhD thesis defense in the morning of 10/9 (Monday) 10-11:30am. Hua¡¦s PhD thesis title is ¡§Prediction modeling and statistical analysis for amino acid substitutions¡¨. Her thesis guidance committee includes Professor Jay Kuo (Chair), Professor Tim Chen (Co-Chair) and Professor Fengzhu Sun (Outside Member) | |
| 2006.10.07 | Dr. Man-On (Simon) Pun received the VTC 2006 Fall Best Student Paper Award |
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Dr. Man-on Pun, Prof. M. Morelli and Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo received the best student paper award sponsored by John Wiley and Sons at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC) 2006 Fall in Montreal, Canada, September 25-28, 2006. The title of their paper is "Iterative equalization and decoding for unsynchronized OFDMA uplink transmissions". VTC is the flagship conference of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. Dr. Pun graduated in the Spring of 2006 and is currently a Post-Doctor at the Princeton University with Professor Vincent Poor | |
| 2006.09.22 | Seminar by Prof. Rajni Garg |
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Topic: Chem-Bio Informatics Approaches to Drug Design By Professor Rajni Garg Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, Cal State, San Marcos, CA Chemistry and Bimolecular Science Department, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY Abstract: Computer assisted drug design techniques play a major role in lead optimization in drug discovery and development, which significantly reduces the time and cost. Chem.-bio informatics encompasses the design, organization, storage, management, retrieval, analysis, dissemination, visualization and use of chemical and biological information. Various tasks involved are data mining, molecular modeling (docking), defining quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR), pharmacophore mapping, structure/substructure searching etc. for predicting biological activity and other properties from chemical structure. Lately, many engineering approaches such as data mining, neural networks, pattern recognition, shape analysis and 3D graphics are being increasingly applied for multi-modality data analysis in order to understand the drug-receptor interaction. In the first part of the talk an introduction of QSAR, neural network, pharmacophore mapping and some of the molecular modeling techniques will be presented. The second half will focus on role of some of the emerging approaches in chem.-bio informatics and a few selected applications in HIV drug design and environmental toxicity will be presented.Bio:Dr. Rajni Garg received the Ph.D. degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India in 1996. She joined Professor Corwin Hansch's laboratory for her postdoctoral research in 1997. She is now a Research Professor in Chemistry and Bimolecular Science Department at Clarkson University, NY; and chemistry and Biochemistry Department at Cal State, San Marcos, CA. Her research interests are in the areas of computer-aided drug design, database development, data mining, chembioinformatics, and environmental toxicity prediction. Dr. Garg is a member of ACS, ISCB, AAAS and many other Societies. She received ACS Cycle of Excellence Award for most accessed article in Chem. Rev. in 2004. Currently, Dr. Garg is advising 3 graduate students research at Clarkson University (see website www.clarkson.edu/~rgarg). Students in her lab have received prestigious CCG Excellence Graduate Award (230th ACS National Meeting, 2005), Shipley Teaching Assistantship award (2005-2006), and CINF- Graduate Fellowship (231st ACS National Meeting, 2006) and summer internships in Pfizer, Wyeth etc. Dr. Garg is a co-author of 32 technical publications in international journals. She has presented her research in 37 national and international conferences as well as contributed two book chapters. Dr. Garg serves as expert reviewer for articles submitted in Mini-Reviews in Medicinal Chemistry, Current Medicinal Chemistry, Bioorganic Medicinal Chemistry, Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters, Internet Electronic Journal of Molecular Design and Letters in Drug Design and Discovery.Host: Professor CC Jay Kuo, x04658, cckuo@sipi.usc.edRelated links: | |
| 2006.09.11 | Congratulation! Ilya has passed his Qualify exam! |
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Congratulations to Ilya for passing his Qualify exam | |
| 2006.09.07 | Congratulation! Wonseok Bake has passed his defense! |
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Congratulations to Wonseok Baek for passing his defense this afternoon | |
| 2006.09.03 | 2006 Fall Seminar Schedule (Updated) |
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The updated seminar schedule is available at Intranet, in the announcement board Related links: | |
| 2006.08.25 | 2006 Fall Office Allocation |
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The latest office allocation is available in the Intranet Related links: | |
| 2006.08.22 | Seminar Abstract |
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Title: "Orthogonal Codes for MAI-Free MC-CDMA with Carrier Frequency Offsets (CFO)" Abstract: The performance of MC-CDMA in the presence of carrier frequency offsets (CFO) can be severely degraded due to multiaccess interference (MAI). It is shown in this work that a properly chosen subset of real Hadamard-Walsh or exponential codes can achieve zero MAI in a CFO environment. For a channel of length L and a number G of power of 2 with G \ge L, we prove that 1+ log_2(N/G) Hadamard-Walsh codewords or N/G exponential codewords can achieve zero MAI under any CFO level. To increase the user capacity of MC-CDMA, we propose using parallel inteference cancellation (PIC) to suppress MAI in a fully-loaded MC-CDMA. We show that the complexity of PIC grows linearly with multipath length rather than with the number of users for a MC-CDMA with exponential codes. Finally, simulation results are given to corroborate derived theoretical results and evaluate the performance of MC-CDMA with a variable number of users in a CFO environment | |