Thesis (M.S.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2002. / Thesis advisor(s): Murali Tummala, Robert Ives. Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-97). Also available online.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-65). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (M.S. in Applied Math and M.S. in Systems Engineering)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Roberto Cristi, Ron Pieper, Craig Rasmussen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-121). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Delaware, 2007. / Principal faculty advisor: Charles G. Boncelet, Dept. of Computer & Information Sciences. Includes bibliographical references.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Perceptual watermarking is a promising technique towards the goal of producing invisible watermarks. It involves the integration of formal perceptual models in the watermarking process, with the purpose of determining those portions of an image that can better tolerate the distortion imposed by the embedding and ensuring that the watermarking will inflict the least possible degradation on the original image . In a previous study the Discrete Cosine Transform was used, and the watermark embedding was done in a non -uniform manner with criteria based on both the host image and the watermark. The decoder model employed made use of apriori access to unmarked and marked images as well as to the watermark. A fair level of success was achieved in this effort. In our research we refine this scheme by integrating a perceptual model and by proposing a modification to the decoder model that makes possible the successful recovery of the watermark without apriori access to it. The proposed perceptual scheme improves the watermark's transparency while at the same time maintains sufficient robustness to quantization and cropping. The proposed semi-blind variation offers adequate transparency and robustness to quantization, but its performance against cropping is considerably degraded. / Lieutenant, Hellenic Navy

JPEG2000 is a recently standardized image compression system that provides substantial improvements over the existing JPEG compression scheme. This improvement in performance comes with an associated cost in increased implementation complexity, such that a purely software implementation is inefficient. This work identifies the arithmetic coder as a bottleneck in efficient hardware implementations, and explores various design options to improve arithmetic coder speed and size. The designs produced improve the critical path of the existing arithmetic coder designs, and then extend the coder throughput to 2 or more symbols per clock cycle. Subsequent work examines more system level implementation issues. This work examines the communication between hardware blocks and utilizes certain modes of operation to add flexibility to buffering solutions. It becomes possible to significantly reduce the amount of intermediate buffering between blocks, whilst maintaining a loose synchronization. Full hardware implementations of the standard are necessarily limited in the amount of features that they can offer, in order to constrain complexity and cost. To circumvent this, a hardware / software codesign is produced using the Altera NIOS II softcore processor. By keeping the majority of the standard implemented in software and using hardware to accelerate those time consuming functions, generality of implementation can be retained, whilst implementation speed is improved. In addition to this, there is the opportunity to explore parallelism, by providing multiple identical hardware blocks to code multiple data units simultaneously.

The Key algorithms of JPEG2000, the new image compression standard, have high computational complexity and thus present challenges for efficient implementation. This has led to research on the hardware optimization of JPEG2000 for its efficient realization. Luckily, in the last century the growth in Microelectronics allows us to realize dedicated ASIC solutions as well as hardware/software FPGA based solutions for complex algorithms such as JPEG2000. But an efficient implementation within hard constraints of area and throughput, demands investigations of key dependencies within the JPEG2000 system. This work presents algorithms and VLSI architectures to realize a high performance JPEG2000 compression system. The embedded block coding algorithm which lies at the heart of a JPEG2000 compression system is a main contributor to enhanced JPEG2000 complexity. This work first concentrates on algorithms to realize low-cost high throughput Block Coder (BC) system. For this purpose concurrent symbol processing capable Bit Plane Coder architecture is presented. Further optimal 2 sub-bank memory and an efficient buffer architectures are designed to keep the hardware cost low. The proposed overall BC system presents the highest Figure Of Merit (FOM) in terms of throughput versus hardware cost in comparison to existing BC solutions. Further, this work also investigates the challenges involved in the efficient integration of the BC with the overall JPEG2000 system. A novel low-cost distortion estimation approach with near-optimal performance is proposed which is necessary for accurate rate-control performance of JPEG2000. Additionally low bandwidth data storage and transfer techniques are proposed for efficient transfer of subband samples to the BC. Simulation results show that the proposed techniques have approximately 4 times less bandwidth than existing architectures. In addition, an efficient high throughput block decoder architecture based on the proposed selective sample-skipping algorithm is presented. The proposed architectures are designed and analyzed on both ASIC and FPGA platforms. Thus, the proposed algorithms, architectures and efficient BC integration strategies are useful for realizing a dedicated ASIC JPEG2000 system as well as a hardware/software FPGA based JPEG2000 solution. Overall this work presents algorithms and architectures to realize a high performance JPEG2000 system without imposing any restrictions in terms of coding modes or block size for the BC system.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

“A picture is worth a thousand words”. If this proverb were taken literally we all know that every person interprets images or photos differently in terms of its content. This is due to the semantics contained in these images. Content-based image retrieval has become a vast area of research in order to successfully describe and retrieve images according to the content. In military applications, intelligence images such as those obtained by the defence intelligence group are taken (mostly on film), developed and then manually annotated thereafter. These photos are then stored in a filing system according to certain attributes such as the location, content etc. To retrieve these images at a later stage might take days or even weeks to locate. Thus, the need for a digital annotation system has arisen. The images of the military contain various military vehicles and buildings that need to be detected, described and stored in a database. For our research we want to look at the effects that the rotation and elevation angle of an object in an image has on the retrieval performance. We chose model cars in order to be able to control the environment the photos were taken in such as the background, lighting, distance between the objects, and the camera etc. There are also a wide variety of shapes and colours of these models to obtain and work with. We look at the MPEG-7 descriptor schemes that are recommended by the MPEG group for video and image retrieval as well as implement three of them. For the military it could be required that when the defence intelligence group is in the field, that the images be directly transmitted via satellite to the headquarters. We have therefore included the JPEG2000 standard which gives a compression performance increase of 20% over the original JPEG standard. It is also capable to transmit images wirelessly as well as securely. Including the MPEG-7 descriptors that we have implemented, we have also implemented the fuzzy histogram and colour correlogram descriptors. For our experimentation we implemented a series of experiments in order to determine the effects that rotation and elevation has on our model vehicle images. Observations are made when each vehicle is considered separately and when the vehicles are described and combined into a single database. After the experiments are done we look at the descriptors and determine which adjustments could be made in order to improve the retrieval performance thereof. / Dr. W.A. Clarke

Thesis (M.E.)--University of New South Wales, 2003. / Also available online.