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Zulin Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Zulin Wang.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Bridge the Gap Between VQA and Human Behavior on Omnidirectional Video: A Large-Scale Dataset and a Deep Learning Model

Omnidirectional video enables spherical stimuli with the $360 \times 180^ \circ$ viewing range. Meanwhile, only the viewport region of omnidirectional video can be seen by the observer through head movement (HM), and an even smaller region within the viewport can be clearly perceived through eye movement (EM). Thus, the subjective quality of omnidirectional video may be correlated with HM and EM of human behavior. To fill in the gap between subjective quality and human behavior, this paper proposes a large-scale visual quality assessment (VQA) dataset of omnidirectional video, called VQA-OV, which collects 60 reference sequences and 540 impaired sequences. Our VQA-OV dataset provides not only the subjective quality scores of sequences but also the HM and EM data of subjects. By mining our dataset, we find that the subjective quality of omnidirectional video is indeed related to HM and EM. Hence, we develop a deep learning model, which embeds HM and EM, for objective VQA on omnidirectional video. Experimental results show that our model significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance of VQA on omnidirectional video.

cs.CV↗

Enhancing Quality for HEVC Compressed Videos

The latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has been increasingly applied to generate video streams over the Internet. However, HEVC compressed videos may incur severe quality degradation, particularly at low bit-rates. Thus, it is necessary to enhance the visual quality of HEVC videos at the decoder side. To this end, this paper proposes a Quality Enhancement Convolutional Neural Network (QE-CNN) method that does not require any modification of the encoder to achieve quality enhancement for HEVC. In particular, our QE-CNN method learns QE-CNN-I and QE-CNN-P models to reduce the distortion of HEVC I and P frames, respectively. The proposed method differs from the existing CNN-based quality enhancement approaches, which only handle intra-coding distortion and are thus not suitable for P frames. Our experimental results validate that our QE-CNN method is effective in enhancing quality for both I and P frames of HEVC videos. To apply our QE-CNN method in time-constrained scenarios, we further propose a Time-constrained Quality Enhancement Optimization (TQEO) scheme. Our TQEO scheme controls the computational time of QE-CNN to meet a target, meanwhile maximizing the quality enhancement. Next, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our TQEO scheme from the aspects of time control accuracy and quality enhancement under different time constraints. Finally, we design a prototype to implement our TQEO scheme in a real-time scenario.

cs.MM↗

Reducing Complexity of HEVC: A Deep Learning Approach

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) significantly reduces bit-rates over the proceeding H.264 standard but at the expense of extremely high encoding complexity. In HEVC, the quad-tree partition of coding unit (CU) consumes a large proportion of the HEVC encoding complexity, due to the bruteforce search for rate-distortion optimization (RDO). Therefore, this paper proposes a deep learning approach to predict the CU partition for reducing the HEVC complexity at both intra- and inter-modes, which is based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and long- and short-term memory (LSTM) network. First, we establish a large-scale database including substantial CU partition data for HEVC intra- and inter-modes. This enables deep learning on the CU partition. Second, we represent the CU partition of an entire coding tree unit (CTU) in the form of a hierarchical CU partition map (HCPM). Then, we propose an early-terminated hierarchical CNN (ETH-CNN) for learning to predict the HCPM. Consequently, the encoding complexity of intra-mode HEVC can be drastically reduced by replacing the brute-force search with ETH-CNN to decide the CU partition. Third, an early-terminated hierarchical LSTM (ETH-LSTM) is proposed to learn the temporal correlation of the CU partition. Then, we combine ETH-LSTM and ETH-CNN to predict the CU partition for reducing the HEVC complexity for inter-mode. Finally, experimental results show that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in reducing the HEVC complexity at both intra- and inter-modes.

cs.CV↗

Multi-Frame Quality Enhancement for Compressed Video

The past few years have witnessed great success in applying deep learning to enhance the quality of compressed image/video. The existing approaches mainly focus on enhancing the quality of a single frame, ignoring the similarity between consecutive frames. In this paper, we investigate that heavy quality fluctuation exists across compressed video frames, and thus low quality frames can be enhanced using the neighboring high quality frames, seen as Multi-Frame Quality Enhancement (MFQE). Accordingly, this paper proposes an MFQE approach for compressed video, as a first attempt in this direction. In our approach, we firstly develop a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based detector to locate Peak Quality Frames (PQFs) in compressed video. Then, a novel Multi-Frame Convolutional Neural Network (MF-CNN) is designed to enhance the quality of compressed video, in which the non-PQF and its nearest two PQFs are as the input. The MF-CNN compensates motion between the non-PQF and PQFs through the Motion Compensation subnet (MC-subnet). Subsequently, the Quality Enhancement subnet (QE-subnet) reduces compression artifacts of the non-PQF with the help of its nearest PQFs. Finally, the experiments validate the effectiveness and generality of our MFQE approach in advancing the state-of-the-art quality enhancement of compressed video. The code of our MFQE approach is available at https://github.com/ryangBUAA/MFQE.git

cs.CV↗

Saliency-Guided Complexity Control for HEVC Decoding

The latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard significantly improves coding efficiency over its previous video coding standards. The expense of such improvement is enormous computational complexity, from both encoding and decoding sides. Since computational capability and power capacity are diverse across portable devices, it is necessary to reduce decoding complexity to a target with tolerable quality loss, so called complexity control. This paper proposes a Saliency-Guided Complexity Control (SGCC) approach for HEVC decoding, which reduces the decoding complexity to the target with minimal perceptual quality loss. First, we establish the SGCC formulation to minimize perceptual quality loss at the constraint on reduced decoding complexity, which is achieved via disabling Deblocking Filter (DF) and simplifying Motion Compensation (MC) of some non-salient Coding Tree Units (CTUs). One important component in this formulation is the modelled relationship between decoding complexity reduction and DF disabling/MC simplification, which determines the control accuracy of our approach. Another component is the modelled relationship between quality loss and DF disabling/MC simplification, responsible for optimizing perceptual quality. By solving the SGCC formulation for a given target complexity, we can obtain the DF and MC settings of each CTU, and then decoding complexity can be reduced to the target. Finally, the experimental results validate the effectiveness of our SGCC approach, from the aspects of control performance, complexity-distortion performance, fluctuation of quality loss and subjective quality.

cs.MM↗

Generalized piggybacking codes for distributed storage systems

This paper generalizes the piggybacking constructions for distributed storage systems by considering various protected instances and piggybacked instances. Analysis demonstrates that the proportion of protected instances determines the average repair bandwidth for a systematic node. By optimizing the proportion of protected instances, the repair ratio of generalized piggybacking codes approaches zero instead of 50% as the number of parity check nodes tends to infinity. Furthermore, the computational complexity for repairing a single systematic node cost by generalized piggybacking codes is less than that of the existing piggybacking designs.

cs.IT↗

A Low-Complexity Encoding of Quasi-Cyclic Codes Based on Galois Fourier Transform

The encoding complexity of a general (en,ek) quasi-cyclic code is O[(e^2)(n-k)k]. This paper presents a novel low-complexity encoding algorithm for quasi-cyclic (QC) codes based on matrix transformation. First, a message vector is encoded into a transformed codeword in the transform domain. Then, the transmitted codeword is obtained from the transformed codeword by the inverse Galois Fourier transform. For binary QC codes, a simple and fast mapping is required to post-process the transformed codeword such that the transmitted codeword is binary as well. The complexity of our proposed encoding algorithm is O[e(n-k)k] symbol operations for non-binary codes and O[ek(n-k)(log_2 e)] bit operations for binary codes. These complexities are much lower than their traditional counterpart O[(e^2)(n-k)k]. For example, our complexity of encoding a 64-ary (4095,2160) QC code is only 1.59% of that of traditional encoding, and our complexities of encoding the binary (4095, 2160) and (8176, 7154) QC codes are respectively 9.52% and 1.77% of those of traditional encoding. We also study the application of our low-complexity encoding algorithm to one of the most important subclasses of QC codes, namely QC-LDPC codes, especially when their parity-check matrices are rank deficient.

cs.IT↗

Low-Density Arrays of Circulant Matrices: Rank and Row-Redundancy Analysis, and Quasi-Cyclic LDPC Codes

This paper is concerned with general analysis on the rank and row-redundancy of an array of circulants whose null space defines a QC-LDPC code. Based on the Fourier transform and the properties of conjugacy classes and Hadamard products of matrices, we derive tight upper bounds on rank and row-redundancy for general array of circulants, which make it possible to consider row-redundancy in constructions of QC-LDPC codes to achieve better performance. We further investigate the rank of two types of construction of QC-LDPC codes: constructions based on Vandermonde Matrices and Latin Squares and give combinatorial expression of the exact rank in some specific cases, which demonstrates the tightness of the bound we derive. Moreover, several types of new construction of QC-LDPC codes with large row-redundancy are presented and analyzed.

cs.IT↗