In this paper, we propose a bit-rate adaptive coding system based on lossless DCT (L-DCT). Our adaptive coding system consists of three different operation modes: lossless, near-lossless and lossy coding modes. Quantization is applied in transform domain (after the L-DCT) and spatial domain (before the L-DCT) in lossy mode and near-lossless mode, respectively. Our adaptive coding system can automatically select its operation mode at a given bit rate because it contains a function to calculate the turning point between near-lossless mode and lossy mode from characteristic of input signal. Existence of the turning point is mathematically proved in this paper. Simulation results confirm not only effectiveness of our adaptive coding system but also accuracy of our theoretical analysis.

In this paper, we propose lossless/lossy coding criterion as a new objective criterion to theoretically evaluate coding performance of the lossless/lossy wavelet (LLW). The proposed lossless/lossy coding criterion consists of three parameters: "lossless coding criterion," "quantization-lossy coding gain" and "rounding errors. " The first parameter is a criterion to evaluate lossless coding performance of the LLW, whereas the second and the third parameters are criteria to evaluate lossy coding performance of the LLW at low bit rate and high bit rate, respectively. Relation among those three parameters is clearly illustrated in this paper. Performances of 15 kinds of the LLW are measured with two-dimensional (2D) octave-decomposition by applying some standard images and 2D AR(1) model as input signals.

A simple but efficient method to improve readability of discrete pseudo time-frequency representations (TFRs) of nonstationary signals by the reassignment of the representations in discrete frequency dimension is presented. The method does not rely on the nonzero time derivative of the window function employed in the estimation of pseudo TFR. This property of the reassignment method is advantageous because the method can provide an improved readability in the situation when a known reassignment method is unefficient. The reassignment of the TFRs of corrupted signals is discussed. Numerical examples are included to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.

This paper proposes a reversible two dimensional (2D) discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for lossless coding which is compatible with the irreversible 2D 9-7 DWT for lossy coding in the JPEG 2000. Since all the filters and scalings are factorized into a product of lifting steps, and signal values are rounded into integers, the proposed DWT is reversible and applicable to lossless coding of 2D signals. We replace a part of the separable 2D transfer function of the 2D DWT by a non separable 2D lifting structure, so that the number of rounding operations is decreased. We also investigate performance of the DWT under octave decomposition case and theoretically endorse it. As a result, reduction of the rounding errors due to the replacement was confirmed. It means that compatibility of the reversible DWT to the irreversible 2D 9-7 DWT is improved.

In this paper, we propose a new one-dimensional (1D) integer discrete cosine transform (Int-DCT) for unified lossless/lossy image compression. The proposed 1D Int-DCT is newly designed to reduce rounding effects by minimizing number of rounding operations. The proposed Int-DCT can be operated not only lossless coding for a high quality decoded image but also lossy coding for a compatibility with the conventional DCT-based coding system. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm an effectiveness of the proposed Int-DCT.

A global tone mapping operation (TMO) for high dynamic range (HDR) images with fixed-point arithmetic is proposed and evaluated in this paper. A TMO generates a low dynamic range (LDR) image from an HDR image by compressing its dynamic range. Since an HDR image is generally expressed in a floating-point data format, a TMO also deals with floating-point data even though a resultant LDR image is integer data. The proposed method treats a floating-point number as two 8-bit integer numbers which correspond to an exponent part and a mantissa part, and applies tone mapping to these integer numbers separately. Moreover, the method conducts all calculations in the tone mapping with only fixed-point arithmetic. As a result, the method reduces a memory cost and a computational cost. The evaluation shows that the proposed method reduces 81.25% of memory usage. The experimental results show that the processing speed of the proposed method with fixed-point arithmetic is 23.1 times faster than the conventional method with floating-point arithmetic. Furthermore, they also show the PSNR of LDR images obtained by the proposed method are comparable to those of the conventional method, though reducing computational and memory cost.

An unwrapping of signal coefficients in transform domain is proposed for applications in which a lossy operation is performed on the coefficients between analysis and synthesis. It is shown that the unwrapping-based modification of signal-to-additive-signal ratio can employ the fact that an implementation of a biorthogonal decomposition is characterized by a mutually orthogonal eigenvectors. An example to illustrate the benefits of the presented approach in lossy image compression applications is shown.

In this paper, implementation of a first-order active complex filter with variable parameter using operational transconductance amplifiers (OTAs) and grounded copacitors is presented. The proposed configurations can be used as s key building block to realize high-order active complex filters with variable parameter in cascade and leapfrog configuration. Experimental results which are in good agreement with theoretical responses are also given o demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed configurations.

The lifting wavelet transform (WT) has been widely applied to image coding. Recently, the total number of lifting steps has been minimized introducing a non-separable 2D structure so that delay from input to output can be reduced in parallel processing. However the minimum lifting WT has a problem that its upper bound of the rate-distortion curve is lower than that of the standard lifting WT. This is due to the rounding noise generated inside the transform in its integer implementation. This paper reduces the rounding noise introducing channel scaling. The channel scaling is designed so that the dynamic range of signal values is fully utilized at each channel inside the transform. As a result, the signal to noise ratio is increased and therefore the upper bound of the minimum lifting WT in lossy coding is improved.

In this paper a novel narrow-band bandpass filter with an output pair of analytic signals is presented. Since it is based on the complex analog filter, both synthesis and response characteristics of this filter are different from conventional bandpass filters. In the design of this filter, the frequency shift method is employed and the conventional lowpass to bandpass frequency transformation is not required. The analysis and examples show that the output signal pair of the proposed filter possesses same filtering characteristics and a 90 degree phase shifting characteristics in the passband. Therefore, the proposed filter will be used for a single sideband (SSB) signal generator without quadrature generator.

We propose a design method for a two-channel perfect reconstruction FIR filter banks employing linear-phase filters. This type of filter bank is especially important in splitting image signals into frequency bands for subband image cording. Because in such an application, it is necessary to use the combination of linear-phase filters and symmetric image signal, namely linear phase signal to avoid the increase in image size caused by filtering. In this paper, first we summarize the design conditions for two-channel filter banks. Next, we show that the design problem is reduced to a very simple linear equation, by using a half-band filter as a lowpass filter. Also the proposed method is available to lead filters with fewer complexity, which enable us to use simple arithmetic operations. For subband coding, the property is important because it reduces hardware complexity.

This paper reduces the total number of lifting steps of a two dimensional (2D) discrete wavelet transform (DWT) under the constraint that the DWT has full compatibility with a given separable 2D DWT. In a DWT composed of several lifting steps in cascade, a lifting step must wait for a calculation result of its previous lifting step. Therefore more lifting steps bring about longer latency from the input to the output. In this paper, we reduce the total number of lifting steps of a quadruple lifting DWT which is widely utilized as the 9/7 DWT in the JPEG 2000 international standard for image data compression. Firstly, we introduce basic properties for modification of signal flow structure inside a DWT without changing its output. Secondly, we convert the separable 2D quadruple lifting DWT into the non-separable 2D DWT utilizing the basic properties so that the total number of the lifting steps is reduced. As a result, the lifting steps were reduced to 75[%]. Finally, we evaluate the proposed non-separable 2D DWT in respect of compatibility with the conventional separable 2D DWT.

In this paper, two universal building blocks for complex filter using CCIIs, CFCCIIs, grounded resistors and grounded capacitors are presented. These can be used to realize various complex bandpass filters with arbitrary order. The paper shows that the response error of the proposed circuit caused by nonideality of active components is more easily compensated than that of the conventional one employing op-amps, and that the sensitivities for all components are relatively small. Experimental results are used for verifying the validity of the proposed circuits.

This paper propeses a new motion compensation (MC) technique which reduces blurring called drift in moving pictures down-scaled with layered coding system. Encoder of the system compresses large amounts of digital video data in the same way of MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) algorithm. Decoder, on the other hand, expands a part of the compressed data and reconstructs down scaled pictures. The purpose of this paper is to reduce blurring which is observed in the reconstructed pictures. In this paper, cause of the blurring is analyzed and the method is introduced as a solution to the problem. The new method is implemented by a little modification of motion compensation (MC) of the decoder, namely increasing the number of tap of interpolation fillters of the MC. Compressing moving pictures, its effectiveness is also confirmed by means of not only subjective test but also signal to noise ratio.

This letter proposes an efficient lossless compression method for high dynamic range (HDR) images in OpenEXR format. The proposed method transforms an HDR image to an indexed image and packs the histogram of the indexed image. Finally the packed image is losslessly compressed by using any existing lossless compression algorithm such as JPEG 2000. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the bit rate of compressed OpenEXR images compared with equipped lossless compression methods of OpenEXR format.

In this paper, we propose a 2-layer lossless coding method for high dynamic range (HDR) images based on range compression and adaptive inverse tone-mapping. Recently, HDR images, which have a wider range of luminance than conventional low dynamic range (LDR) ones, have been frequently used in various fields. Since commonly used devices cannot yet display HDR images, 2-layer coding methods that decode not only HDR images but also their LDR versions have been proposed. We have previously proposed a state-of-the-art 2-layer lossless coding method for HDR images that unfortunately has huge HDR file size. Hence, we introduce two ideas to reduce the HDR file size to less than that of the previous method. The proposed method achieves high compression ratio and experiments show that it outperforms the previous method and other conventional methods.

This letter considers a unified tone mapping operation (TMO) for HDR images. The unified TMO can perform tone mapping for various HDR image formats with a single common operation. The integer TMO which can realize unified tone mapping by converting an input HDR image into an intermediate format is proposed. This method can be executed efficiently with low memory and low performance processor. However, only floating-point HDR image formats have been considered in the method. In other words, a long-integer which is one of the HDR image formats has not been considered in the method. This letter applies the method to a long-integer format, and confirm its performance. The experimental results show the proposed method is effective for an integer format in terms of the resources such as the computational cost and the memory cost.

As three dimensional (3D) discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is widely used for high resolution volumetric data compression, and to further improve the performance of lossless coding, the adaptive directional lifting (ADL) structure based on non-separable 3D DWT with a (5,3) filter is proposed in this paper. The proposed 3D DWT has less lifting steps and better prediction performance compared to the existing separable 3D DWT with fixed filter coefficients. It also has compatibility with the conventional DWT defined by the JPEG2000 international standard. The proposed method shows comparable and better results with the non-separable 3D DWT and separable 3D DWT and it is effective for lossless coding of high resolution volumetric data.

A number of successful tone mapping operators (TMOs) for contrast compression have been proposed due to the need to visualize high dynamic range (HDR) images on low dynamic range devices. This paper proposes a novel inverse tone mapping (TM) operation and a new remapping framework with the operation. Existing inverse TM operations require either the store of some parameters calculated in forward TM, or data-depended operations. The proposed inverse TM operation enables to estimate HDR images from LDR ones mapped by the Reinhard's global operator, not only without keeping any parameters but also without any data-depended calculation. The proposed remapping framework with the inverse operation consists of two TM operations. The first TM operation is carried out by the Reinhard's global operator, and then the generated LDR one is stored. When we want different quality LDR ones, the proposed inverse TM operation is applied to the stored LDR one to generate an HDR one, and the second TM operation is applied to the HDR one to generate an LDR one with desirable quality, by using an arbitrary TMO. This framework allows not only to visualize an HDR image on low dynamic range devices at low computing cost, but also to efficiently store an HDR one as an LDR one. In simulations, it is shown that the proposed inverse TM operation has low computational cost, compared to the conventional ones. Furthermore, it is confirmed that the proposed framework allows to remap the stored LDR one to another LDR one whose quality is the same as that of the LDR one remapped by the conventional inverse TMO with parameters.

This paper proposes a new type of layered video coding especially for the use of monitoring water level of a river. A sensor node of the system decomposes an input video signal into some kinds of component signals and produces a bit stream functionally separated into three layers. The first layer contains the minimum components effective for detecting the water level. It is transmitted at very low bit rate for regular monitoring. The second layer contains signals for thumb-nail video browsing. The third layer contains additional data for decoding the original video signal. These are transmitted in case of necessity. A video signal is decomposed into several bands with the three dimensional Haar transform. In this paper, optimum bands to be contained into the 1st layer are experimentally investigated considering both of water level detection and data size to be transmitted. As a result, bit rate for transmitting the first layer is reduced by 32.5% at the cost of negligible 3.7% decrease of recognition performance for one of video examples.