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In this paper, a content adaptive coding method for plenoptic video is proposed to reduce both of the spatial and temporal redundancy. Based on the spatial correlations among subapertures, the plenoptic video is divided into two subaperture groups: the central view videos and the residual videos. Coding methods, multiview coding method based on spatial correlation(S-MVC) and multiview coding method based on temporal correlation(T-MVC), are adopted for residual videos according to correlation and residual energy analysis, while the central view videos are always encoded by S-MVC. Correlation analysis is performed first, and residual energy analysis is further performed if necessary. Coding the central view videos and the residual videos separately reduces bitstream, choosing different encoding methods for residual videos makes full use of the characteristics of different video content. Both the central view videos and the residual videos are compressed by MV-HEVC. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms a pseudo-sequence-based MVC method for plenoptic video by an average of 25.06% bitrate saving.

Content-adaptive steganography intends to hide data in the complex texture content of the image. Recently, some secure steganography methods have been proposed to identify the textural complexity of an image. However, most of the techniques do not take into account the information of pixel variation around the central pixel in all possible directions and therefore they are unable to accurately analyse the texture complexity. This work offers a quality-enhanced and secure method of content-adaptive image steganography. The proposed method is divided into three sequential steps: image segmentation, pixel complexity identification, and data embedding. An input cover image is initially divided into small local regions and the pixel-complexity is identified based on the proposed Complex Block Prior (CBP) criterion. In a local block, a high pass filter (HPF) bank is applied and eight residual responses are obtained. Following the CBP criterion, a complexity level out of nine levels is assigned to an individualized pixel block. The pixels are then arranged in the priority of complexity from highest to lowest. Data embedding for the corresponding complexity level then takes place using the proposed adaptive embedding algorithm. Experimental results verify the preservation of visual quality of stego images produced by the proposed method. Three image datasets: Standard test images, BOWS2 and BOSS-base are used for the experimentation and comparison with prior state-of-art methods. Highest values of the IQ (image quality) parameters e.g., SSIM and WPSNR show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In video applications it is necessary to continuously measure the video quality perceived by the end-user. Thus it is desirable to know which parts of video frame, i.e. which contents, attract viewers’ attention. If this information is known, then it is possible to estimate perceived video quality in a meaningful way. However, automatic detection of viewers’ fixation points is time-consuming process and often is omitted in objective video quality assessment (VQA) metrics. Based on our previous work, in which we proposed Foveation-based content Adaptive Root Mean Squared Error (FARMSE) VQA metric, in this work we propose two new full-reference (FR) VQA metrics called Multi-Point FARMSE (MP-FARMSE), and Simple-FARMSE (S-FARMSE). Both new-proposed metrics are based on foveated-vision features of human visual system and spatio-temporal features of video signal. In MP-FARMSE, by using an engineering approach, we implemented the fact that viewer’s attention can be directed out of the center of the frame, thus covering use-cases when objects of interest are not located in the center of the frame. The main idea when creating the S-FARMSE metric was to reduce the computational complexity of the final algorithm and to make S-FARMSE metric capable of processing high-resolution video signals in real-time. Performances of the new-proposed metrics are compared to performances of seven existing VQA metrics on two different video quality databases. The results show that performances achieved by MP-FARMSE and S-FARMSE are quite close to those of state-of-the-art VQA metrics, whereas at the same time their computational complexity level is significantly lower.

When the video is compressed and transmitted over heterogeneous networks, it is necessary to ensure the satisfying quality for the end user. Since human observers are the end users of video applications, it is very important that the human visual system (HVS) characteristics are taken into account during the video quality evaluation. This paper deals with video quality assessment (VQA) based on HVS characteristics and proposes a novel full-reference (FR) VQA metric called the Foveation-based content Adaptive Root Mean Squared Error (FARMSE). FARMSE uses several HVS characteristics that significantly influence perception of distortions in a video. Primarily these are foveated vision, reduction of the spatial acuity due to motions as well as spatial masking. Foveated vision is related to variable resolution of HVS across the viewing field, where the highest resolution is at the point of fixation. The point of fixation is projected onto the fovea – the area of retina with the highest density of photoreceptors. The part of image that falls on fovea is perceived by the highest acuity, whereas the spatial acuity decreases as the distance of the image part from the fovea increases. Spatial acuity further decreases if eyes cannot track moving objects. Both mentioned mechanisms influence contrast sensitivity of the HVS. Contrast sensitivity is frequency dependent and FARMSE uses Haar filters to utilize this dependence. Furthermore, spatial masking is implemented in each frequency channel. The FARMSE performance is compared to this of nine state-of-the-art VQA metrics on two different databases, LIVE and ECVQ. Additionally, the metrics are compared in terms of calculation complexity. The performed experiments show that FARMSE achieves high performance when predicting the quality of videos with different resolutions, degradation types and content types. FARMSE results outperform the results of most of the analyzed metrics, whereas they are comparable to these of the best publicly available metrics, including the well-known MOtion-based Video Integrity Evaluation (MOVIE) index. Besides that, FARMSE calculation complexity is significantly lower than that of the metrics comparable thereto in terms of prediction accuracy.

This paper presents a steganalytic approach against video steganography which modifies motion vector (MV) in content adaptive manner. Current video steganalytic schemes extract features from fixed-length frames of the whole video and do not take advantage of the content diversity. Consequently, the effectiveness of the steganalytic feature is influenced by video content and the problem of cover source mismatch also affects the steganalytic performance. The goal of this paper is to propose a steganalytic method which can suppress the differences of statistical characteristics caused by video content. The given video is segmented to subsequences according to block’s motion in every frame. The steganalytic features extracted from each category of subsequences with close motion intensity are used to build one classifier. The final steganalytic result can be obtained by fusing the results of weighted classifiers. The experimental results have demonstrated that our method can effectively improve the performance of video steganalysis, especially for videos of low bitrate and low embedding ratio.

We propose a new pre-roll delay-distortion optimization (DDO) framework that allows determination of the minimum pre-roll delay and distortion while ensuring continuous playback for on-demand content-adaptive video streaming over limited bitrate networks. The input video is first divided into temporal segments, which are assigned a relevance weight and a maximum distortion level, called relevance-distortion policy, which may be specified by the user. The system then encodes the input video according to the specified relevance-distortion policy, whereby the optimal spatial and temporal resolutions and quantization parameters, also called encoding parameters, are selected for each temporal segment. The optimal encoding parameters are computed using a novel, multi-objective optimization formulation, where a relevance weighted distortion measure and pre-roll delay are jointly minimized under maximum allowable buffer size, continuous playback, and maximum allowable distortion constraints. The performance of the system has been demonstrated for on-demand streaming of soccer videos with substantial improvement in the weighted distortion without any increase in pre-roll delay over a very low-bitrate network using AVC/H.264 encoding.

A content adaptive, network aware approach for joint optimization of wireless video transmission is presented in this article. The joint system optimization approach has been developed in the framework of the IST PHOENIX project (www.ist-phoenix.org). After a description of the considered cross-layer approach and of the information to be exchanged among the system component blocks, the concept of "JSCC/D controllers" is introduced. Results obtained through the demonstrator realized as proof-of-concept for the described paradigm are then shown, confirming the validity of the described joint optimization approach

The introduction of HDTV asks for spatial up-conversion techniques enabling the display of standard resolution material. Recently, X. Li and M. Orchard proposed the 'New Edge-Directed Interpolation' (NEDI) algorithm for high quality up-scaling of natural images. We shall show that the method, although it generally behaves well, introduces annoying artifacts in fine-textured areas. Based on an analysis of these artifacts and taking advantage of the temporal correlation between video images, we propose an improved NEDI algorithm. In our evaluation, we compare the performance of the original and the improved NEDI method on a significant set of test images. We conclude from both subjective and objective measures that the proposed modifications improve the overall performance of NEDI.