Multi-stabilities in Cognitive System

The following animation shows an intriguing property of motion perception: there exist two attractors (clock-wise and anti-clockwise) in this dynamic system. Folktales tell you whether you see it clockwise or anticlockwise will determine whether your left brain or right brain  is dominating. What is more interesting to me is how can we have two stable [...]

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Some Thoughts on Compound Video Coding

While at Sharp, I worked on compound image coding problem – a compound image consists of the mixture of photographic pictures, graphics and texts. Djvu and PDF have become the standard document images formats. In the past four years, especially due to the increasing popularity of YouTube, more and more video clips are available online. [...]

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Stalemate in Motion Segmentation?

Motion segmentation is a task essential to many video processing applications from coding and tracking to recognition and restoration. While unlike image segmentation, research progress in motion segmentation has remained slow in the past decade. One way of justifying this claim is to use “motion segmentation” as the keyword in Google Scholar search. You will [...]

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Motion Representation and Motion Perception

A fundamental difference of video from image is that it contains motion information. That is why video is also called motion pictures and MPEG stands for Motion Pictures Expert Group. Well, if a MPEG expert explains the details of block-based video coding algorithm to a neuro-scientist, he might be questioned as soon as he speaks: [...]

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Color issue in video acquisition (continuation of my previous post)

The other poorly addressed issue in video acquisition is color. Yes, we have heard about lots of technical terms such as YUV, YIQ, 4:2:0, 4:4:4 etc. Those convey little meaning in a scientist’s mind. The fact is: color is a notoriously difficult problem which we do not understand well. I once heard that at least [...]

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Video Acquisition: some scientific thoughts

Raw video data have two important attributes: spatial resolution and temporal resolution. Spatial resolution refers to the total number of pixels in a frame – as sensor technology advances, we have witnessed ever-increasing spatial resolution – e.g., from standard TV to HDTV (of course 1080p is a better and more expensive option than 720p). Temporal [...]

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Welcome to the wonderful world of video processing

Disney will not be a wonderful world for kids if movie or animated film were not invented. Since Roundhay Garden Scene, the world’s earliest film, by Louis Le Prince, in 1888, we have witnessed how video technology has evolved and impacted our daily lives. It took mankind less than 120 years to go from analog [...]

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