Search

This paper presents the overview and rationale behind the Decoder-Side Depth Estimation (DSDE) mode of the MPEG Immersive Video (MIV) standard, using the Geometry Absent profile, for efficient compression of immersive multiview video. A MIV bitstream generated by an encoder operating in the DSDE mode does not include depth maps. It only contains the information required to reconstruct them in the client or in the cloud: decoded views and metadata. The paper explains the technical details and techniques supported by this novel MIV DSDE mode. The description additionally includes the specification on Geometry Assistance Supplemental Enhancement Information which helps to reduce the complexity of depth estimation, when performed in the cloud or at the decoder side. The depth estimation in MIV is a non-normative part of the decoding process, therefore, any method can be used to compute the depth maps. This paper lists a set of requirements for depth estimation, induced by the specific characteristics of the DSDE. The depth estimation reference software, continuously and collaboratively developed with MIV to meet these requirements, is presented in this paper. Several original experimental results are presented. The efficiency of the DSDE is compared to two MIV profiles. The combined non-transmission of depth maps and efficient coding of textures enabled by the DSDE leads to efficient compression and rendering quality improvement compared to the usual encoder-side depth estimation. Moreover, results of the first evaluation of state-of-the-art multiview depth estimators in the DSDE context, including machine learning techniques, are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the problem of human action recognition using 3D reconstruction data is deeply investigated. 3D reconstruction techniques are employed for addressing two of the most challenging issues related to human action recognition in the general case, namely view variance (i.e., when the same action is observed from different viewpoints) and the presence of (self-) occlusions (i.e., when for a given point of view a body part of an individual conceals another body part of the same or another subject). The main contributions of this paper are summarized as follows. The first one is a detailed examination of the use of 3D reconstruction data for performing human action recognition. The latter includes the introduction of appropriate local/global flow/shape descriptors, extensive experiments in challenging publicly available datasets and exhaustive comparisons with state-of-art approaches. The second one is a new local-level 3D flow descriptor, which incorporates spatial and surface information in the flow representation and efficiently handles the problem of defining 3D orientation at every local neighborhood. The third one is a new global-level 3D flow descriptor that efficiently encodes the global motion characteristics in a compact way. The fourth one is a novel global temporal-shape descriptor that extends the notion of 3D shape descriptions for action recognition, by incorporating the temporal dimension. The proposed descriptor efficiently addresses the inherent problems of temporal alignment and compact representation, while also being robust in the presence of noise (compared with similar tracking-based methods of the literature). Overall, this paper significantly improves the state-of-art performance and introduces new research directions in the field of 3D action recognition, following the recent development and wide-spread use of portable, affordable, high-quality and accurate motion capturing devices (e.g., Microsoft Kinect). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a DC coefficient estimation algorithm for intra-predicted residual blocks in the High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. Discarding the DC coefficient directly in each transform block leads to substantial bit-saving, but at the same time produces strong discontinuities between neighboring blocks. To overcome this problem, we propose an estimation algorithm for the DC coefficient, which solves an optimal offset in a closed-form to recover the corresponding block edges. Then, we embed this algorithm into HEVC in its rate-distortion optimized quantization and sign bit hiding steps. Furthermore, a flag is signaled to decide whether the DC estimation strategy is used for each transform block. Test results under the common test condition show that our algorithm achieves 1.5% and 1.6% BD-rate reduction on average for luma and chroma, respectively, under all intra configuration. In the meantime, our simulation results show that both encoding time and decoding time increase only slightly (about 10%, without any special optimization on programming our proposed algorithm). When testing the proposed DC estimation algorithm on inter coding configurations, including low delay with P pictures, low delay with B pictures, and random access, we can also achieve 0.5%–1.1% bit-rate savings on average, while nearly no extra encoding and decoding time is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image classification needs to consider the existence of image degradations in practice. Although degraded images have various levels of degradation, the degradation levels are usually unknown. This paper proposes a convolutional neural network to classify degraded images by using a restoration network and an ensemble learning. The proposed network can automatically infer ensemble weights by using estimated degradation levels of degraded images and features of restored images, where the degradation levels are estimated internally. The proposed network is mainly discussed with JPEG distortion, while degradations of both Gaussian noise and blurring are also examined. We demonstrate that the proposed network can classify degraded images over various levels of degradation. This paper also reveals how the image-quality of training data for a classification network affects the classification performance of degraded images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuous and accurate depth information of blast furnace burden surface is important for optimizing charging operations, thereby reducing its energy consumption and CO2 emissions. However, depth estimation for a single image is challenging, especially when estimating the depth of burden surface images in the harsh internal environment of the blast furnace. In this paper, a novel method that is based on edge defocus tracking is proposed to estimate the depth of burden surface images with different morphological characteristics. First, an endoscopic video acquisition system is designed, key frames of burden surface video in stable state are extracted based on feature point optical flow method, and the sparse depth is estimated by using the defocus-based method. Next, the burden surface image is divided into four subregions according to the distribution characteristics of the burden surface, the edge line trajectories and an eight-direction depth gradient template are designed to develop depth propagation rules. Finally, the depth is propagated from edge to the entire image based on edge line tracking method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately and efficiently estimate the depth of the burden surface and provide key data support for optimizing the operation of blast furnace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The function of an image dehazing algorithm restores a hazy image back to a clear one. This technique can be equipped in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to further improve driving safety. Advanced display resolutions and high frame rates are critical to improve the reliability of ADAS. However, they cause a serious limitation on the hardware realization of an image dehazing algorithm. In this paper, an algorithm and architecture design of a hardware-efficient image dehazing engine are proposed. This dehazing algorithm comprises two core techniques: a low-complexity airlight estimation (LAE) and an independent transmission rate estimation (ITRE). LAE can efficiently predict the airlight without massive sorting processes and a computationally intensive filtering. Moreover, in its hardware architecture, a preluded airlight estimation is proposed to yield an efficient data scheduling. Being independent of the airlight, ITRE is able to solely predict transmission rates. This enables LAE and ITRE to be concurrently processed, improving the throughput of their hardware architectures. Compared with other sophisticated studies, this study demonstrates a competitive performance in peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity, contrast distortion, and computational efficiency. The hardware architecture is realized using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company CMOS 0.18- $\mu \text{m}$ technology, and logic gate count is 32.6 K. Its working frequency is 200 MHz with a power consumption of 16.5 mW. The maximum throughput is as high as 600 megapixels/s, which can support $4\,096\times 2\,160$ at 60 frames/s. The experimental results indicate that this paper demonstrates superior energy and area efficiencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some applications, video content needs to be encoded and uploaded to a remote destination within a pre-defined amount of time. In order to guarantee that the overall processing time does not exceed certain time constraints, a system that performs joint encoding and uploading time control is needed. Such a system requires the flexibility to control both the time spent in the encoding process and the bit-rate. This is because the latter significantly influences the transmission time, especially for transmissions under low-bandwidth constraints. This paper proposes a novel approach to address this challenge by adapting the quantization parameters (QP) of a video encoder in order to meet overall processing time requirements, including both encoding and uploading time. The proposed QP adaptation approach relies on mechanisms to accurately predict the encoding time and bit-rate during the encoding process for the incoming group of pictures. This in turn allows adequate QP selections that result in accurately meeting the overall time constraints. A comprehensive experimental evaluation shows that the proposed QP adaptation approach can accurately meet the overall time constraints by efficiently adapting the encoding process to different target times and bandwidth conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate, low-latency, and energy-efficient optical flow estimation is a fundamental kernel function to enable several real-time vision applications on mobile platforms. This paper presents neighbor-guided semi-global matching (NG-fSGM), a new low-complexity optical flow algorithm tailored for low-power mobile applications. NG-fSGM obtains high accuracy optical flow by aggregating local matching costs over a semi-global region, successfully resolving local ambiguity in texture-less and occluded regions. The proposed NG-fSGM aggressively prunes the search space based on neighboring pixels’ information to significantly lower the algorithm complexity from the original fSGM. As a result, NG-fSGM achieves $17.9{\times}$ reduction in the number of computations and $8.37{\times}$ reduction in memory space compared to the original fSGM without compromising its algorithm accuracy. A multicore architecture for NG-fSGM is implemented in hardware to quantify algorithm complexity and power consumption. The proposed architecture realizes NG-fSGM with overlapping blocks processed in parallel to enhance throughput and to lower power consumption. The eight-core architecture achieves 20 M pixel/s (66 frames/s for VGA) throughput with 9.6 mm2 area at 679.2-mW power consumption in 28-nm node. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel method for automatic depth estimation from color images using parameter transfer. By modeling the correlation between color images and their depth maps with a set of parameters, we get a database of parameter sets. Given an input image, we extract the high-level features to find the best matched image sets from the database. Then the set of parameters corresponding to the best match are used to estimate the depth of the input image. Compared with the past learning-based methods, our trained model consists only of trained features and parameter sets, which occupy little space. We evaluate our depth estimation method on several benchmark RGB-D (RGB + depth) data sets. The experimental results are comparable to the state-of-the-art results, while the model size is very small and very suitable for mobile devices, demonstrating the promising performance of our proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a data assimilation network is proposed to tackle the challenges of domain generalization for person re-identification (ReID). Most of the existing research efforts only focus on single-dataset issues, and the trained models are difficult to generalize to unseen scenarios. This paper presents a distinctive idea to improve the generality of the model by assimilating three types of images: style-variant images, misaligned images and unlabeled images. The latter two are often ignored in the previous domain generalization ReID studies. In this paper, a non-local convolutional block attention module is designed for assimilating the misaligned images, and an attention adversary network is introduced to correct it. A progressive augmented memory is designed for assimilating the unlabeled images by progressive learning. Moreover, we propose an attention adversary difference loss for attention correction, and a labeling-guide discriminative embedding loss for progressive learning. Rather than designing a specific feature extractor that is robust to style shift as in most previous domain generalization work, we propose a data assimilation meta-learning procedure to train the proposed network, so that it learns to assimilate style-variant images. It is worth mentioning that we add an unlabeled augmented dataset to the source domain to tackle the domain generalization ReID tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art domain generalization methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The occurrence of motion blur along with defocus blur is a common phenomena in natural images. Usually, these blurs are spatially varying in nature for any general image and estimation of one type of blur is affected by presence of other. In this paper, we propose a novel method to estimate the concurrent defocus and motion blurs in a single image. Unlike the recent methods, which perform well only on simulated conditions or in presence of single type of blur, proposed method works well for real images as well as for compressed images. In this paper, we consider only commonly associated motion and defocus blurs for analysis. Decoupling of motion and defocus blur provides a fundamental tool that can be used for various analysis and applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entropy coding is a fundamental technology in video coding that removes statistical redundancy among syntax elements. In high efficiency video coding (HEVC), context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) is adopted as the primary entropy coding method. The CABAC consists of three steps: binarization, context modeling, and binary arithmetic coding. As the binarization processes and context models are both manually designed in CABAC, the probability of the syntax elements may not be estimated accurately, which restricts the coding efficiency of CABAC. To address the problem, we propose a convolutional neural network-based arithmetic coding (CNNAC) method and apply it to compress the syntax elements of the intra-predicted residues in HEVC. Instead of manually designing the binarization processes and context models, we propose directly estimating the probability distribution of the syntax elements with a convolutional neural network (CNN), as CNNs can adaptively build complex relationships between inputs and outputs by training with a lot of data. Then, the values of the syntax elements, together with their estimated probability distributions, are fed into a multi-level arithmetic codec to perform entropy coding. In this paper, we have utilized the CNNAC to code the syntax elements of the DC coefficient; the lowest frequency AC coefficient; the second, third, fourth, and fifth lowest frequency AC coefficients; and the position of the last non-zero coefficient in the HEVC intra-predicted residues. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves up to 6.7% BD-rate reduction and an average of 4.7% BD-rate reduction compared to the HEVC anchor under all intra (AI) configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blind noise-level estimation (NLE) is a fundamental issue in digital image processing. This paper provides a noise-level estimator for additive white Gaussian noise and multiplicative Gaussian noise using principal texture patches (PTPs). The proposed algorithm first identifies the principal texture of the noisy image by using the principal component analysis, and then, it chooses PTPs to calculate the noise level. The major contributions of this paper toward addressing the challenges in the NLE literature include: 1) analyzing the nonlinear relationship between the smallest eigenvalue, true noise level, number of chosen patches, and block size; 2) extracting PTPs; and 3) computing noise level using PTPs. The abundant experimental results show that the proposed method works well for various natural images over a large range of noise levels and it performs well for multiplicative noise. Compared with some state-of-the-art approaches, our method has the best performance and a faster running speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating 3D shape of an object from 2D observations in a monocular image is fundamentally an inverse problem due to the ambiguity of the projection from 3D to 2D and becomes more challenging when there are undesirable outliers in the observations. In this paper, we develop a robust model to estimate 3D shape from 2D landmarks with an unknown camera pose. The 3D shape of the object is assumed as a linear combination of a group of prior shape bases. At the same time, we explicitly model the outliers as sparse noises to handle severely contaminated observations. The objective function is nonconvex and nonsmooth constrained on Stiefel manifold, where the coupling of underdetermined shape representation coefficients and camera pose makes it more difficult to solve. We first propose a numerical algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers for the no-outlier case. We set the orthogonality constraints into the smooth subproblem, which admits a closed-form solution, and the other subproblems are all well known and can be easily solved. We then extend this algorithm to the proposed robust model. The proposed algorithms can achieve convergence rapidly. The experimental results on both synthetic data and real data show that the proposed method outperforms the other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inter prediction is a crucial part of hybrid video coding frameworks, utilized to exploit the temporal redundancy in video sequences and improve the coding performance. During inter prediction, a predicted block is typically derived from reference pictures using motion estimation and motion compensation. To improve the coding performance of inter prediction, a neural network based enhancement to inter prediction (NNIP) is proposed in this paper. NNIP is composed of three networks, namely residue estimation network, combination network, and deep refinement network. Specifically, first, a residue estimation network is designed to estimate the residue between current block and its predicted block using their available spatial neighbors. Second, the feature maps of the estimated residue and the predicted block are extracted and concatenated in a combination network. Finally, the concatenated feature maps are fed into a deep refinement network to generate a refined residue, which is added back to the predicted block to derive a more accurate predicted block. NNIP is integrated in HEVC to evaluate its efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate that NNIP can achieve 4.6%, 3.0%, and 2.7% BD-rate reduction on average under LDP, LDB, and RA configurations compared to HEVC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear matching (LM) is a simple and effective method for solving image matching problems. In many cases, image matching problems are nonlinear due to involvement of the geometric transformations; therefore, an essential step for utilizing linear models for image matching is to linearize the geometric transformation matrices that introduce nonlinear terms into image matching problems. Existing LM methods usually use low-order transformations to artificially initialize a linear model. In this paper, we propose a residual-consensus driven LM algorithm that generalizes existing LM methods by allowing higher order transformations to automatically initialize a linear model. Based on the observation that transformation models generated from inlier subsets exhibit correlated behaviors (termed residual consensus hereafter), we develop a residual-consensus robust estimation algorithm to project the nontrivial linear transformation problem into a much smaller subspace, and thus enable efficient optimizations through linear programming. The experimental results on synthetic and real databases demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In numerous video segmentation algorithms, shape and color priors from previous frames are propagated to successive frames for processing. One prime issue of the existing algorithms is how priors are modeled and propagated effectively. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for accurate and robust foreground prediction via a local appearance model based on shape and color. In the shape estimation process, instead of performing global matching, a local search mechanism is developed to capture complex motions. In addition, global information is used to facilitate local matching for the final shape estimation. Color cues from multiple frames are used to estimate the foreground (background) pixel distribution in the current image. Furthermore, the contribution of each frame is weighted based on its reliability and discriminative strength. Based on the proposed local appearance model, a graph cut algorithm is used to generate segmentation results. The experimental results show that accurate video segmentation can be obtained by the proposed algorithm with fewer user interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 3D video quality issues that may disturb the human visual system and negatively impact the 3D viewing experience are well known and become more relevant as the availability of 3D video content increases, primarily through 3D cinema, but also through 3D television. In this paper, we propose four algorithms that exploit available stereo disparity information, in order to detect disturbing stereoscopic effects, namely, stereoscopic window violations, bent window effects, uncomfortable fusion object objects, and depth jump cuts on stereo videos. After detecting such issues, the proposed algorithms characterize them, based on the stress they cause to the viewer’s visual system. Qualitative representative examples, quantitative experimental results on a custom-made video data set, a parameter sensitivity study, and comments on the computational complexity of the algorithms are provided, in order to assess the accuracy and the performance of stereoscopic quality defect detection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we propose a new method for estimating the visual focus of attention (VFOA) in a video stream captured by a single distant camera and showing several persons sitting around a table, like in formal meeting or video conferencing settings. The visual targets for a given person are automatically extracted online using an unsupervised algorithm that incrementally learns the different appearance clusters from low-level visual features computed from face patches provided by a face tracker without the need of an intermediate error-prone step of head pose estimation as in classical approaches. The clusters learned in that way can then be used to classify the different visual attention targets of the person during a tracking run, without any prior knowledge on the environment and the configuration of the room or the visible persons. The experiments on public datasets containing almost 2 h of annotated videos from meetings and video conferencing show that the proposed algorithm produces state-of-the-art results and even outperforms a traditional supervised method that is based on head orientation estimation and that classifies VFOA using Gaussian mixture models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding where people are located and how they are moving about in an environment is critical for operators of large public spaces such as shopping centers, and large public infrastructures such as airports. Automated analysis of CCTV footage is increasingly being used to address this need through techniques that can count crowd sizes, estimate their density, and estimate the through-put of people into and/or out of a choke-point. A limitation of using CCTV based approaches, however, is the need to train models specific to each view which, for large environments with 100s or 1000s of cameras, can quickly become problematic. While there is some success in developing scene-invariant crowd counting and crowd density estimation approaches, much less attention has been given to developing scene-invariant solutions for through-put estimation. In this paper, we investigate the use of convolutional neural network and long short-term memory architectures to estimate pedestrian through-put from arbitrary CCTV viewpoints. To properly develop and demonstrate our approach, we present a new 22 view database featuring 44 h of pedestrian throughput annotation, containing over 11 000 annotated people; and using this proposed approach we show that we are able to outperform a scene-dependant approach across a diverse set of challenging view-points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many practical engineering applications, the number of actions that have been finished should be known, particularly for an untrimmed video sequence that includes an event with a series of actions, it is important to know the number of actions that have been finished. In this paper, we termed this process as visual event progress estimation (EPE). However, the research related to this problem is few in the research community. To solve this problem, a visual human action analysis-based framework, namely one-shot simultaneously action detection and identification (SADI)-EPE, is presented in this paper. The visual EPE is modeled as an online one-shot learning-based problem; sliding window and attention-based bag of key poses formulate our framework. Unlike most of the action analysis methods relying on a number of training data of some predefined classes, our method can realize SADI for any event if one sample of the event is given, which makes it feasible for practical applications. At the same time, not only SADI but also the progress estimation of the event can be realized by our algorithm. In terms of methodology, the key pose is defined by an invariant pose descriptor from skeletal data and silhouette data. Moreover, in order to extract representative and discriminative poses from one training sample, we present a new bidirectional $k$ NN-based attention weighted key pose selection method, which can filter the unrelated actions and model different importance of various key poses. In addition, an attention-based multi-modal fusion scheme, which addresses the difficulty of high-dimensional features and few training samples, is proposed to augment the performance of our algorithm. Finally, we propose an evaluation criterion for the estimation problem. Extensive results demonstrated the efficacy of our proposed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depth image-based rendering (DIBR) techniques have recently drawn more attention in various 3D applications. In this paper, a real-time high-quality DIBR system that consists of disparity estimation and view synthesis is proposed. For disparity estimation, a local approach that focuses on depth discontinuities and disparity smoothness is presented to improve the disparity accuracy. For view synthesis, a method that contains view interpolation and extrapolation is proposed to render high-quality virtual views. Moreover, the system is designed with an optimized parallelism scheme to achieve a high throughput, and can be scaled up easily. It is implemented on an Altera Stratix IV FPGA at a processing speed of 45 frames per second for 1080p resolution. Evaluated on selected image sets of the Middlebury benchmark, the average error rate of the disparity maps is 6.02%; the average peak signal to noise ratio and structural similarity values of the virtual views are 30.07 dB and 0.9303, respectively. The experimental results indicate that the proposed DIBR system has the top-performing processing speed and its accuracy performance is among the best of state-of-the-art hardware implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a scalable approach for counting pedestrians crossing a virtual line when the crowd is highly dynamic and possibly extremely dense. The approach mainly consists of two parts: local crowd density estimation and pedestrian counting based on accumulating local densities across the line. To obtain a fine estimation of local crowd densities, we divide the neighborhood at the line into a number of blocks. We enforce spatial consistency between local counts in the blocks and those in the enclosing regions to guarantee consistent estimation of local crowd densities. For scalability to various density levels in crowd density estimation, we propose a two-stage strategy: pre-classification of density levels and subsequent regression with overlapped operational ranges. To count pedestrians crossing the virtual line, we accumulate the crowd densities across the line according to the locally estimated velocities. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and its scalability to crowdedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an ordinal deep learning approach for facial age estimation. Unlike conventional hand-crafted feature-based methods that require prior and expert knowledge, we propose an ordinal deep feature learning (ODFL) method to learn feature descriptors for face representation directly from raw pixels. Motivated by the fact that age labels are chronologically correlated and age estimation is an ordinal learning problem, our proposed ODFL enforces two criteria on the descriptors, which are learned at the top of the deep networks: 1) the topology-preserving ordinal relation is employed to exploit the order information in the learned feature space and 2) the age-difference cost information is leveraged to dynamically measure face pairs with different age value gaps. However, both the procedures of feature extraction and age estimation are learned independently in ODFL, which may lead to a sub-optimal problem. To address this, we further propose an end-to-end ordinal deep learning (ODL) framework, where the complementary information of both the procedures is exploited to reinforce our model. Extensive experimental results on five face aging datasets show that both our ODFL and ODL achieve superior performance in comparisons with most state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counting on-road vehicles in the highway is fundamental for intelligent transportation management. This paper presents the first highway vehicle counting method in compressed domain, aiming at achieving comparable estimation performance with the pixel-domain methods. Counting in compressed domain is rather challenging due to limited information about vehicles and large variance in vehicle numbers. To address this problem, we develop new low-level features to mitigate the challenge from insufficient information in compressed videos. The new proposed features can be easily extracted from the coding-related metadata. Then, we propose a hierarchical classification-based regression (HCR) model to estimate the number of vehicles from the compressed-domain low-level features for individual frame. HCR hierarchically divides the traffic scenes into different cases according to the density of vehicles such that the large variance of traffic scenes can be effectively captured. Beside the spatial regression in each frame, we propose a locally temporal regression model to further refine the counting results, which exploits the continuous variation characteristics of the traffic flow. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on real highway surveillance videos. The experimental results consistently show that the proposed method is very competitive compared with the pixel-domain methods, which can reach similar performance with much lower computational cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the popularity of 3D videos, 2D-to-3D video conversion has become a hot research topic for the past few years. The most critical issue in 3D video synthesis is the estimation of depth maps for the video frames. Numerous efforts have been devoted in fully automatic and semi-automatic depth estimation approaches, although the discontinuity of depth field and the ambiguity of motion boundary are still the main challenges in depth estimation. This paper proposes a semi-automatic structure-aware sparse-to-dense depth estimation method, which leverages the tensor voting at two different levels to propagate depth across frames. In the first level, a 4D tensor voting is performed to remove outliers caused by inaccurate motion estimation. Noticing that the 4D tensors of correctly matched points should lie on the smooth layer in the manifold, we utilize the variety saliency defined by the eigen-system of the tensor for outlier removal. In the second level, a high-dimensional tensor voting algorithm, incorporating spatial location, motion, and color into the tensor representation, is devised to propagate the depth from the sparse points to the entire image domain. By projecting the input feature into the tangent space, the relation between the location, motion, color, and the depth can be established by voting process. Extensive experiments on public data set validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art depth estimation approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although numerous trackers have been designed to adapt to the nonstationary image streams that change over time, it remains a challenging task to facilitate a tracker to accurately distinguish the target from the background in every frame. This paper proposes a robust superpixel-based tracker via depth fusion, which exploits the adequate structural information and great flexibility of mid-level features captured by superpixels, as well as the depth-map's discriminative ability for the target and background separation. By introducing graph-regularized sparse coding into the appearance model, the local geometrical structure of data is considered, and the resulting appearance model has a more powerful discriminative ability. Meanwhile, the similarity of the target superpixels' neighborhoods in two adjacent frames is also incorporated into the refinement of the target estimation, which helps a more accurate localization. Most importantly, the depth cue is fused into the superpixel-based target estimation so as to tackle the cluttered background with similar appearance to the target. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed tracker, four video sequences of different challenging situations are contributed by the authors. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed tracker has more robust and accurate performance than seven ones representing the state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel tracking-by-detection approach for multitarget tracking. There are two major steps in our framework: data association to form global tracklet association, followed by trajectory estimation to deal with the remaining gaps. In the first step, we formulate tracklet association as an inference problem in a Hough forest random field, which combines Hough forest and conditional random field and allows us to model both local and global tracklet relationships in one unified model. In the second step, we improve the reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo particle filtering method with explicit mutual-occlusion reasoning to fill in the remaining gaps from the first step and increase the overall tracking precision. Extensive experiments have been conducted on five public data sets, and the performance is comparable to that of the state-of-the-art method, if not better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new method for detecting primary objects in unconstrained videos in a completely automatic setting. Here, we define the primary object in a video as the object that presents saliently in most of the frames. Unlike previous works considering only local saliency detection or common pattern discovery, the proposed method integrates the local visual/motion saliency extracted from each frame, global appearance consistency throughout the video, and spatiotemporal smoothness constraint on object trajectories. We first identify a temporal coherent salient region throughout the whole video, and then explicitly learn a global appearance model to distinguish the primary object against the background. In order to obtain high-quality saliency estimations from both appearance and motion cues, we propose a novel self-adaptive saliency map fusion method by learning the reliability of saliency maps from labeled data. As a whole, our method can robustly localize and track primary objects in diverse video content, and handle the challenges such as fast object and camera motion, large scale and appearance variation, background clutter, and pose deformation. Moreover, compared with some existing approaches that assume the object is present in all the frames, our approach can naturally handle the case where the object is present only in part of the frames, e.g., the object enters the scene in the middle of the video or leaves the scene before the video ends. We also propose a new video data set containing 51 videos for primary object detection with per-frame ground-truth labeling. Quantitative experiments on several challenging video data sets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with the recent state of the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a novel spectral reflectance estimation method from image pairs including near-infrared (NIR) components based on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is presented. The proposed method enables estimation of spectral reflectance from only two kinds of input images: 1) an image including both visible light components and NIR components and 2) an image including only NIR components. These two images can be easily obtained using a general digital camera without an infrared-cut filter and one with a visible light-cut filter, respectively. Since RGB values of these images are obtained according to spectral sensitivity of the image sensor, the spectrum power distribution of the light source and the spectral reflectance, we have to solve the inverse problem for estimating the spectral reflectance. Therefore, our method approximates spectral reflectance by a linear combination of several bases obtained by applying NMF to a known spectral reflectance data set. Then estimation of the optimal solution to the above problem becomes feasible based on this approximation. In the proposed method, NMF is used for obtaining the bases used in this approximation from a characteristic that the spectral reflectance is a nonnegative component. Furthermore, the proposed method realizes simple approximation of the spectrum power distribution of the light source with direct and scattered light components. Therefore, estimation of spectral reflectance becomes feasible using the spectrum power distribution of the light source in our method. In the last part of this paper, we show some simulation results to verify the performance of the proposed method. The effectiveness of the proposed method is also shown using the method for several applications that are closely related to spectral reflectance estimation. Although our method is based on a simple scheme, it is the first method that realizes the estimation of the spectral reflectance and the spectrum power distribution of the light source from the above two kinds of images taken by general digital cameras and provides breakthroughs to several fundamental applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our aim is to estimate the perspective-effected geometric distortion of a scene from a video feed. In contrast to most related previous work, in this task we are constrained to use low-level spatiotemporally local motion features only. This particular challenge arises in many semiautomatic surveillance systems that alert a human operator to potential abnormalities in the scene. Low-level spatiotemporally local motion features are sparse (and thus require comparatively little storage space) and sufficiently powerful in the context of video abnormality detection to reduce the need for human intervention by more than 100-fold. This paper introduces three significant contributions. First, we describe a dense algorithm for perspective estimation, which uses motion features to estimate the perspective distortion at each image locus and then polls all such local estimates to arrive at the globally best estimate. Second, we also present an alternative coarse algorithm that subdivides the image frame into blocks and uses motion features to derive block-specific motion characteristics and constrain the relationships between these characteristics, with the perspective estimate emerging as a result of a global optimization scheme. Third, we report the results of an evaluation using nine large sets acquired using existing closed-circuit television cameras, not installed specifically for the purposes of this paper. Our findings demonstrate that both proposed methods are successful, their accuracy matching that of human labeling using complete visual data (by the constraints of the setup unavailable to our algorithms). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a novel scheme of reversible data hiding in encrypted images using distributed source coding. After the original image is encrypted by the content owner using a stream cipher, the data-hider compresses a series of selected bits taken from the encrypted image to make room for the secret data. The selected bit series is Slepian–Wolf encoded using low-density parity check codes. On the receiver side, the secret bits can be extracted if the image receiver has the embedding key only. In case the receiver has the encryption key only, he/she can recover the original image approximately with high quality using an image estimation algorithm. If the receiver has both the embedding and encryption keys, he/she can extract the secret data and perfectly recover the original image using the distributed source decoding. The proposed method outperforms the previously published ones. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Object recognition is widely used in vision computing for various applications. Traditional CPU and application specific integrated circuit for vision computing cannot provide high performance and enough flexibility, which limit the use of vision systems. In this paper, a hierarchical and parallel pipelined heterogeneous chip for object recognition is proposed to achieve high flexibility, high performance, and area efficiency. In addition, a reformulation of 3D position estimation is proposed. The method uses single precision to achieve the short computing time and accuracy requirement. The hardware resource is small. Application-specific components, such as connected component information extractor and information extraction accelerator, are designed for high performance. Reconfiguration processors and application-specific instruction set processor are introduced to improve flexibility. These components are connected to hierarchical parallel buses. The chip is fabricated in 180-nm CMOS technology and occupies 72.25 mm2 with 1.09M bits on-chip memory. It delivers 204 GOPS + 665M FLOPS operations. The results show that this hierarchical and parallel pipelined heterogeneous chip is suitable for embedded vision systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marketing over online social networks (OSNs) has become an essential tool for spreading product information in a “word of mouth” way. In particular, campaigns normally adopt a pragmatic approach of seeding videos with a selected list of influential users, hoping to create a viral distribution to reach as many users as possible. In this paper, we propose a multitopic-aware influence maximization framework to identify a fixed number of influential users and assign video clips of specific topics to them, with an ultimate objective to maximize the number of message deliveries, defined as expected posting number (EPN). We first prove the submodularity of the EPN function, resulting in a general greedy algorithm with a performance bound of $1-1/e$ . We further develop two faster algorithms to accelerate the computing speed for large-scale social networks. The first algorithm leverages two estimation methods to compute the upper bound for marginal EPN without a loss of accuracy. The second algorithm generates an approximation solution based on the upper bound and lower bound estimation, with a performance bound of $\epsilon (1-1/e)$ . We have implemented a prototype system based on a private data center at the Nanyang Technological University campus in Singapore to enable video clip extraction and sharing among social users. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on four real large-scale social networks (with different scales and structures) and the results show that the proposed methods are much faster than previous algorithms but with high accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fast and accurate optical flow estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision. In this paper, we present a novel model to solve the optical flow problem by combining the strengths of the Split Bregman method with the advantages of an efficient variational framework. It allows us to employ different regularization tensors for the Split Bregman regularizer to preserve motion discontinuities. Simultaneously, a novel nonlocal Split Bregman method with adaptive support weights is also developed for the smoothness regularization to preserve motion details, repel outliers, enhance contrast, and reduce motion blurring and staircase effect. The proposed algorithm shows significant improvements in preserving sharp flow edges and important motion details. Most of all, it requires only a few iterations to achieve fast convergence and runs faster than the classic TV-L1 flow method. Our method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on the challenging MPI-Sintel dataset and shows good performance on the Kitti flow 2015 and Middlebury datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As an essential step in many computer vision tasks, camera calibration has been studied extensively. In this paper, we propose a novel calibration technique that, based on geometric analysis, camera parameters can be estimated effectively and accurately from just one view of only five corresponding points. Our core contribution is the geometric analysis for deriving the basic equations to realize camera calibration from four coplanar corresponding points and a fifth noncoplanar one. The position, orientation, and focal length of a zooming camera can be directly estimated with unique solution. The estimated parameters are further optimized by the bundle adjustment technique. The proposed calibration method is examined and evaluated on both computer simulated data and real images. The experimental results confirm the validity of the proposed method that camera parameters can be estimated with sufficient accuracy using just five-point correspondences from a single image, even in the presence of image noise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Researchers have devoted great efforts to image dehazing with prior assumptions in the past decade. Recently developed example-based approaches typically lack elegant models for the hazy process and meanwhile demand synthetic hazy images by manual selection. The priors from observations, and those trained from synthetic images cannot always reflect true structural information of natural images in practice. In this paper, we present a learning model for haze removal by using two-layer Gaussian process regression (GPR). By using training examples, the two-layer GPR establishes a direct relationship from the input image to the depth-dependent transmission, and learns local image priors to further improve the estimation. We also provide a systematic scheme to automatically collect suitable training pairs, which works for both simulated examples and images of natural scenes. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons on real-world and synthetic hazy images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, especially for white or bright objects and heavy haze regions in which traditional methods may fail. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As one of the fundamental technologies for scene understanding, semantic segmentation has been widely explored in the last few years. Light field cameras encode the geometric information by simultaneously recording the spatial information and angular information of light rays, which provides us with a new way to solve this issue. In this paper, we propose a high-quality and challenging urban scene dataset, containing 1074 samples composed of real-world and synthetic light field images as well as pixel-wise annotations for 14 semantic classes. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest and the most diverse light field dataset for semantic segmentation. We further design two new semantic segmentation baselines tailored for light field and compare them with state-of-the-art RGB, video and RGB-D-based methods using the proposed dataset. The outperforming results of our baselines demonstrate the advantages of the geometric information in light field for this task. We also provide evaluations of super-resolution and depth estimation methods, showing that the proposed dataset presents new challenges and supports detailed comparisons among different methods. We expect this work inspires new research direction and stimulates scientific progress in related fields. The complete dataset is available at https://github.com/HAWKEYE-Group/UrbanLF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translation averaging is known to be more difficult than rotation averaging due to scale ambiguity, estimation sensitivity, and solution uncertainty. Existing approaches have exposed their limitations in terms of accuracy, robustness, simplicity, or efficiency. To tackle this tough problem, a simple yet effective translation averaging pipeline, termed as Incremental Translation Averaging (ITA), is proposed in this paper. It combines the advantages of high accuracy and robustness in incremental parameter estimation pipeline and the advantages of high simplicity and efficiency in global motion averaging approach. Unlike the traditional translation averaging methods which estimate all the absolute camera locations simultaneously and suffer from inaccuracy in parameter estimation and incompleteness in scene reconstruction, our ITA computes them novelly in an incremental way with higher accuracy and robustness. Thanks to the introduction of incremental parameter estimation thought into the translation averaging pipeline, 1) our ITA is robust to measurement outliers and accurate in parameter estimation; and 2) our ITA is simple and efficient because of its less dependency on complicated optimization, carefully-designed preprocessing, or additional information. Comprehensive evaluations on the 1DSfM dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our ITA and its advantages over several state-of-the-art translation averaging approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning has greatly promoted the development of multi-view stereo in recent years. However, how to measure the reliability of the estimated depth map for practical applications and make reasonable depth hypothesis sampling for the cost volume building in the coarse-to-fine architecture are still unresolved crucial problems. To this end, an Uncertainty Guided multi-view Network (UGNet) is proposed in this paper. In order to enable the network to perceive the uncertainty, an uncertainty-aware loss function is introduced, which not only can infer uncertainty implicitly in an unsupervised manner but also can reduce the bad impact of high uncertainty regions and the erroneous labels in the training set during training. Moreover, an uncertainty-based depth hypothesis sampling strategy is further proposed to adaptively determine the depth search range of each pixel for finer stages, which helps to generate more rational depth intervals compared with other methods and build more compact cost volumes without redundancy. Experimental results on DTU dataset, BlendedMVS dataset, Tanks and Temples dataset and ETH3D high-res benchmark show that our method achieves promising reconstruction results compared with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, deep semi-supervised hashing methods have attracted increasing attention, which can significantly improve retrieval performance by leveraging abundant unlabeled data. These methods usually generate surrogate supervision signals to learn with unlabeled data, such as neighborhood information and augmentation invariant requirements. However, an essential issue of these methods is that the supervised signals are not always reliable, which may damage the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Uncertainty-Aware and Multi-Granularity Consistent Constrained Semi-Supervised Hashing (UMCSH) method to alleviate the negative effects of noisy supervised signals and enlarge the inter-class distance. Specifically, our UMCSH mainly consists of an Uncertainty-Aware Instance-Level Consistency (UAILC) model and a Cluster-Based Class-Level Consistency (CBCLC) model. UAILC introduces an uncertainty estimation method to select reliable supervised signals to extract discriminative features for each unlabeled data. CBCLC establishes connections between labeled data and unlabeled data by encouraging each unlabeled sample to be close to the hash center (calculated with the labeled data) according to its pseudo-label. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approach compared with several state-of-the-art semi-supervised hashing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-modal hashing that leverages hash functions to project high-dimensional data from different modalities into the compact common hamming space, has shown immeasurable potential in cross-modal retrieval. To ease labor costs, unsupervised cross-modal hashing methods are proposed. However, existing unsupervised methods still suffer from two factors in the optimization of hash functions: 1) similarity guidance, they barely give a clear definition of whether is similar or not between data points, leading to the residual of the redundant information; 2) optimization strategy, they ignore the fact that the similarity learning abilities of different hash functions are different, which makes the hash function of one modality weaker than the hash function of the other modality. To alleviate such limitations, this paper proposes an unsupervised cross-modal hashing method to train hash functions with discriminative similarity guidance and adaptively-enhanced optimization strategy, termed Deep Adaptively-Enhanced Hashing (DAEH). Specifically, to estimate the similarity relations with discriminability, Information Mixed Similarity Estimation (IMSE) is designed by integrating information from distance distributions and the similarity ratio. Moreover, Adaptive Teacher Guided Enhancement (ATGE) optimization strategy is also designed, which employs information theory to discover the weaker hash function and utilizes an extra teacher network to enhance it. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DAEH against the state-of-the-arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a specific data hiding technique, reversible data hiding (RDH) has recently received extensive attention. By this technique, both the embedded data and the original cover image can be exactly extracted from the marked image. In our previous work, a general expansion-shifting model for RDH is proposed by introducing the so-called reversible embedding function (REF). With REF, RDH can be designed and the corresponding rate-distortion formulations can be established, providing an approach to optimize the reversible embedding performance. In this paper, by extending our previous work, optimal REF for one-dimensional histogram is investigated, and all optimal REF are derived in this case when the maximum modification to the cover pixel is limited as a small value. Moreover, based on the derived optimal REF for one-dimensional histogram and multiple histograms modification, a practical RDH scheme is presented and it is experimental verified better than some state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of capacity-distortion performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the widespread use of deep learning in single object tracking task, mainstream tracking algorithms treat tracking as a combined classification and regression problem. Classification aims at locating an arbitrary target, and regression aims at estimating the corresponding bounding box. In this paper, we focus on regression and propose a novel box estimation network, which consists of a transformer encoder target pyramid guide (TPG) and transformer decoder target pyramid spread (TPS). Specifically, the transformer encoder TPG is designed to generate fine-grained prior knowledge with explicit representation for template targets. In contrast to the raw transformer encoder, we capture the visual dependence through local-global self-attention and deem the multi-scale target regions as the “local” region. Using this fine-grained prior knowledge, we design the transformer decoder TPS to spread it to the subsequent search regions with high affinity to accurately estimate the bounding boxes. Considering that self-attention fails to model information interaction across channels between the template target and search regions, we develop a channel-wise cross-attention block within the TPS as compensation. Extensive experiments on the OTB100, UAV123, NFS, VOT2020, VOT2021, LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, TrackingNet and GOT-10k benchmarks show that the proposed box estimation network outperforms most existing box estimation methods. Furthermore, our trackers based on this estimation network exhibit a competitive performance against state-of-the-art trackers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event cameras such as the Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) are useful because of their low latency, sparse output, and high dynamic range. In this paper, we propose a DVS+FPGA camera platform and use it to demonstrate the hardware implementation of event-based corner keypoint detection and adaptive block-matching optical flow. To adapt sample rate dynamically, events are accumulated in event slices using the area event count slice exposure method. The area event count is feedback controlled by the average optical flow matching distance. Corners are detected by streaks of accumulated events on event slice rings of radius 3 and 4 pixels. Corner detection takes about 6 clock cycles (16 MHz event rate at the 100MHz clock frequency) At the corners, flow vectors are computed in 100 clock cycles (1 MHz event rate). The multiscale block match size is $25\times 25$ pixels and the flow vectors span up to 30-pixel match distance. The FPGA processes the sum-of-absolute distance block matching at 123 GOp/s, the equivalent of 1230 Op/clock cycle. EDFLOW is several times more accurate on MVSEC drone and driving optical flow benchmarking sequences than the previous best DVS FPGA optical flow implementation, and achieves similar accuracy to the CNN-based EV-Flownet, although it burns about 100 times less power. The EDFLOW design and benchmarking videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/edflow21/home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discriminative correlation filter (DCF)-based methods have demonstrated superior performance in UAV tracking via fusing multiple types of features and updating models online. However, most DCF-based trackers simply cascade different features, failing to fully take advantage of their complementary strength. In addition, online update strategies are limited to using a single and fixed learning rate, which often leads to model degradation when suffering tracking challenges. In this paper, we present an Auto-Perceiving Correlation Filter (APCF) which explicitly models the target and context with a novel Target State and Background Perception (TSBP) feature. Concretely, we first propose a simple yet effective State Evaluation Metric (SEM) to estimate target states by analyzing the spatial distribution of responses. Based on SEM, we extract TSBP features by adaptively selecting effective features depending on the current target state. Accordingly, a new online model update strategy is also introduced to avoid model degradation. Moreover, we further introduce a perception regularization term to make the extracted feature emphasis more on the target rather than background. Extensive experiments on four widely-used UAV benchmarks have well demonstrated the superiority of the proposed method compared with both DCF and deep learning based trackers while running at a high speed of 76.7 FPS on a single CPU. In addition, APCF with deep features also performs favorably against state-of-the-art trackers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vision-based lane detection is a critical component of modern automotive active safety systems. Although a number of robust and accurate lane estimation (LE) algorithms have been proposed, computationally efficient systems that can be realized on embedded platforms have been less explored and addressed. This paper presents a framework that incorporates contextual cues for LE to further enhance the performance in terms of both computational efficiency and accuracy. The proposed context-aware LE framework considers the state of the ego vehicle, its surroundings, and the system-level requirements to adapt and scale the LE process resulting in substantial computational savings. This is accomplished by synergistically fusing data from multiple sensors along with the visual data to define the context around the ego vehicle. The context is then incorporated as an input to the LE process to scale it depending on the contextual requirements. A detailed evaluation of the proposed framework on real-world driving conditions shows that the dynamic and static configuration of the lane detection process results in computation savings as high as 90%, without compromising on the accuracy of LE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) is frequently used in multiview video applications such as free-viewpoint television. In this paper, we consider the two DIBR algorithms used in the Moving Picture Experts Group view synthesis reference software, and develop a scheme for the encoder to estimate the distortion of the synthesized virtual view at the decoder when the reference texture and depth sequences experience transmission errors such as packet loss. We first develop a graphical model to analyze how random errors in the reference depth image affect the synthesized virtual view. The warping competition rule adopted in the DIBR algorithms is explicitly represented by the graphical model. We then consider the case where packet loss occurs to both the encoded texture and depth images during transmission and develop a recursive optimal distribution estimation (RODE) method to calculate the per-pixel texture and depth probability distributions in each frame of the reference views. The RODE is then integrated with the graphical model method to estimate the distortion in the synthesized view caused by packet loss. Experimental results verify the accuracy of the graphical model method, the RODE, and the combined estimation scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reversible image watermarking is a technique that allows the cover image to remain unmodified after watermark extraction. Prediction error expansion-based schemes are currently the most efficient and widely used class of reversible image watermarking techniques. In this paper, first, we prove that the bounded capacity distortion minimization problem for prediction error expansion-based reversible watermarking schemes is NP-hard, and the corresponding decision version of the problem is NP-complete. Then, we prove that the dual problem of bounded distortion capacity maximization problem for prediction error expansion-based reversible watermarking schemes is NP-hard, and the corresponding decision problem is NP-complete. Furthermore, taking advantage of the integer linear programming formulations of the optimization problems, we find the optimal performance metric values for a given image, using concepts from the optimal linear prediction theory. Our technique allows the calculation of these performance metric limit without assuming any particular prediction scheme. The experimental results for several common benchmark images are consistent with the calculated performance limits validate our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, region-based 3D video coding has been proposed. However, existing view synthesis distortion estimation (VSDE) methods are performed at the frame level. To guide the rate-distortion optimization process of region-based 3D video coding schemes, this paper proposes the first pixel-level VSDE (PL-VSDE) method. We first give the definition of the pixel-level view synthesis distortion. To estimate it, a backward prediction method is then developed, which starts from the pixels of interest (POIs) in the virtual view and finds their corresponding pixels in the reference view via a coarse-to-fine approach, denoted as coarse-to-fine backward prediction (CFBP) method. Additionally, the CFBP fully considers the details of 3D warping, the rounding operation and the warping competition in view synthesis, leading to improve accuracy of the prediction. Besides, a table-lookup method and a warping property are introduced to speed up the CFBP. After integrating the CFBP into the PL-VSDE, we can estimate the view synthesis distortion at the pixel level. Our method is carried out pixel-by-pixel independently, which is friendly for parallel processing. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method has significant advantages in both accuracy and efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art frame-level VSDE methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]