The depth information is a fundamental factor in stereo imaging. The depth information of an object can be associated to the horizontal shift (with respect to the location in the parallax image) in a simple linear relation. Therefore, we can generate a stereo video by combining a regular monoscopic video with an artificial parallax video implemented with a designed horizontal shift. In this research, the manmade horizontal shift is designed according to the pixel translations of the monoscopic video obtained by the optical flow computation algorithm. Optical flow proposed by Horn and Schunck was originally developed in the field of computer vision for the application of moving detection. Following this flow computation algorithm, a vector segmentation algorithm is applied to the flow field for grouping effects associated to the foreground. Finally, some merging procedures are applied to get a better foreground mask. With this foreground mask,the parallax video is then generated for creating our artificial stereo video.

The topic of stereo video is getting more attention among these days due to its high quality of visual effect. However, the large volume of data is the problem of its application. There is much similarity between the parallax videos. This similarity is obtained by a shape compensation technique. The topic of this thesis is to investigate a compression technique by on the shape compensation stereo video data. The shape transformation in this paper is coded by the kinds of morphological operations to be applied. This processing is a type of operation by which the spatial form or structure of objects within an image are modified. Morphological operation is usually applied to the binary images. There are two problems for the selection of the optimal morphological filter: the collection of the candidate filters and the sources of the voters. For the gray level images the mask operation is changed to be the more complex window weighting operation. By a strategy of slicing the image umbrella, our masked gray morphological operation is also more computation-efficient than the regular gray morphological operation. Experimental results in this thesis have demonstrated that shape compensation is more efficient than motion compensation for the secondary (right) video sequence.

This research focuses on extracting road models from stereo video sequences taken from a moving vehicle. The proposed method combines color histogram based segmentation, active contours (snakes) and morphological processing to extract road boundary coordinates for conversion into Matlab or Multigen OpenFlight compatible polygonal representations. Color segmentation uses an initial truth frame to develop a color probability density function (PDF) of the road versus the terrain. Subsequent frames are segmented using a Maximum Apostiori Probability (MAP) criteria and the resulting templates are used to update the PDFs. Color segmentation worked well where there was minimal shadowing and occlusion by other cars. A snake algorithm was used to find the road edges which were converted to 3D coordinates using stereo disparity and vehicle position information. The resulting 3D road models were accurate to within 1 meter.

The advances in multimedia technologies increased the interest in utilizing three dimensional (3D) video applications in mobile devices. However, wireless transmission is significantly prone to errors. Typically, packets may be corrupted or lost due to transmission errors, causing blocking artifacts. Furthermore, because of compression and coding, the error propagates through the sequence and salient features of the video cannot be recovered until a key-frame or synchronization-frame is correctly received. Without the use of concealment and enhancement techniques, visible artifacts would inevitably and regularly appear in the decoded stream. In this thesis, error concealment techniques for full frame losses in depth plus video and stereo video structures are implemented and compared. Temporal and interview correlations are utilized to predict the lost frames while considering the memory usage and computational complexity.The concealment methods are implemented on jm17.2 decoder which is based on H.264/AVC specifications [1]. The simulation results are compared with the simple frame copy (FC) method for different sequences having different characteristics.

Les formulations et modèles de vagues stochastiques sont les outils les plus traditionnels pour l’évaluation et la prévision des états de mer. Cependant, la prise en compte de nombreux processus physiques essentiels à l’évolution des vagues reste souvent lacunaire dans ces types d’approches. Une des raisons possible est notamment que peu d’observations viennent documenter ces processus. La dissipation des ondes est ainsi mal quantifiée par les méthodes d'observation traditionnelles dans tout l’éventail des conditions océaniques. Dans ce contexte, le travail présenté dans cette thèse explore plus avant les conditions menant au déferlement à travers la modulation de l'énergie des ondes courtes par de fort courants de marée et par des ondes plus longues.Dans cette étude, nous avons profité des campagnes de mesure BBWAVES, spécialement conçues pour acquérir de la donnée dans des zones d’interactions vagues courants.Ces campagnes ont notamment permis de tester une nouvelle bouée dérivante conçue pour la mesure des vagues dans des zones à forts courants de marées. Grâce à des mesures simultanées en zones de forts courants, il a été possible de mettre en évidence des lacunes dans la modélisation des états de mer, et l’influence vraisemblable des erreurs dans la modélisation atmosphérique pour ces conditions. Cette thèse a également tiré parti d’une campagne de mesure stéréo-vidéo d’états de mer en Mer Noire afin d’étudier différents aspects du déferlement des vagues dans une grande variété de conditions d'état de mer bimodales. Ces mesures ont permis de mettre en évidence une modulation des ondes courtes par des longues et une incidence sur les propriétés de déferlement. / Stochastic wave formulations and models are the most common tools for the assessment and forecast of sea surface conditions. Their ability to account for some of the processes encountered by waves during their evolution remains however a central question. Among other processes, the wave dissipation is for instance still poorly quantified and traditional methods for wave measurements fail to proper insight into its physics in a wide range of conditions. In this context, the work presented in this PhD aims to explore available observation techniques for their application to several quantitative aspects of the dissipation of wave energy, and particularly for short wave modulated by strong tidal currents, for short wave modulated by longer waves. This work takes advantage of the BBWAVES oceanic campaigns, especially planned to explore questions related to wave and current interactions. Data from a large variety of sensors are analyzed. The campaign provides the ground for the test of a new design of drifting buoy aimed at measuring waves in areas of strong tidal current. Its performances are verified and the description it provides of the area is explored. From simultaneous measurements, it was possible to highlight the actual inaccuracies in wave model capabilities as well as the contribution of the error contained in the atmospheric modeling over strong tidal currents to the misevaluation of sea states. This work also used an extensive dataset from a stereo video experiment in the Black Sea to investigate wave breaking in bimodal sea state conditions. These measurements have revealed the influence of long wave modulation over short wave breaking.

Les vagues courtes sont omniprésentes à la surface des océans, avec des longueurs de quelques dizaines de mètres au mètre typiquement. Connaitre leurs directions de propagation en mer est important à plusieurs titres, notamment pour la compréhension de la dynamique de l'état de mer, des échanges air-mer ou de la dérive de particules en surface. Ces distributions directionnelles sont étudiées ici au regard des progrès récents réalisés en techniques d'instrumentation. L'analyse du bruit sismo-acoustique enregistré en grandes profondeurs permet d'extraire un comportement quasi-universel qui dépend indirectement de cette distribution à travers ladite intégrale de recouvrement. Il est cohérent avec des observations directes du champ de vagues obtenues à partir de reconstructions tridimensionnelles de la surface de l'océan. Alors que la direction de propagation des vagues longues s'aligne avec celle du vent, les vagues courtes s'en détachent d'autant plus à mesure que leurs échelles diminuent (bimodalité).La comparaison de ces observations avec les prédictions d'un modèle numérique de vagues, basé sur l'environnement WAVEWATCH®III, permet de constater que ces modèles sont qualitativement valables mais encore quantitativement incorrects. Une des possibilités explorées pour corriger cet effet est la prise en compte de sources de vagues courtes à ±90° de la direction du vent, qui pourraient être associées au déferlement des vagues longues. Une telle source à elle seule n'explique pas les formes des distributions directionnelles observées. D'autres mécanismes pourraient intervenir que de futures investigations pourront tenter de clarifier. / Short surface gravity waves are ubiquitous at the ocean surface, with lengths from a few tens of meters to a meter typically.Knowing their propagation directions at sea is important in several respects, especially for the understanding of sea-state dynamics, airsea interactions and particles surface drift.Their directional distributions are here investigated in the light of the recent progress made in instrumentation techniques. The analysis of ocean bottom seismo-acoustic noise records allows for the extraction of a quasi-universal behavior which indirectly depends on this distribution through the socalled overlap integral. It is coherent with direct observations of the wave field obtained from tri-dimensional reconstructions of the ocean surface elevation field. While the propagation direction of long waves aligns with the wind direction, short waves progressively detach from it towards small scales (bimodality).Comparing those measurements with the predictions of a spectral numerical wave model, based on WAVEWATCH®III environment, allows to realize that they provide qualitatively correct but quantitatively incorrect predictions. One of the possibilities here explored to correct for it, is by accounting for the sources of energy at ±90° to the wind direction, which could be associated with the breaking of long waves. This source term on its own does not explain the shapes of the observed directional distributions. Other mechanisms could come into play that future investigations will help clarify.

Les récentes paramétrisations utilisées dans les modèles spectraux de vagues offrent des résultats intéressants en termes de prévision et rejeux des états de mer. Cependant, de nombreux phénomènes physiques présents dans ces modèles sont encore mal compris et donc mal modélisés, notamment le terme de dissipation lié au déferlement des vagues.Le travail présenté dans cette thèse vise dans un premier temps à analyser et critiquer les paramétrisations existantes de la dissipation, au travers de la modélisation explicite des propriétés du déferlement sous-jacentes. Du constat de l’échec de ces paramétrisations à reproduire les observations in situ et satellite du déferlement, une nouvelle méthode d’observation et d’analyse des déferlements est proposée à l’aide de systèmes de stéréo vidéo. Cette méthode permet l’observation des déferlements sur des surfaces de mer reconstruites à haute résolution par stéréo triangulation. Ainsi, une méthode complète de reconstruction des surfaces de mer en présence de vagues déferlantes est proposée et validée. La détection des vagues déferlantes sur les images et leur reprojection sur les surfaces reconstruites est également discutée. Bien que peu d’acquisitions soient disponibles, les différents paramètres observables grâce à l’utilisation de la stéréo vidéo sont mis en avant. Ce travail montre l’intérêt des systèmes vidéo stéréo pour une meilleure observation et compréhension du déferlement des vagues, pour le développement des paramétrisations de la dissipation dans les modèles spectraux de vague. / The recent parameterizations used in spectral wave models provide today interesting results in terms of forecast and hindcast of the sea states. Nevertheless, many physical phenomena present in these models are still poorly understood and therefore poorly modeled, in particular the dissipation source term due to breaking. First, the work presented in this thesis is aimed at analyzing and criticizing the existing parameterizations of the dissipation through the explicit modeling of the underlying properties of breaking. The finding of the failure of these parameterizations to reproduce the in situ and satellite observations, a new method for the observation and the analysis of breaking is proposed using stereo video systems . This method allows the observation of breaking waves on the high-resolution stereo-reconstructed sea surfaces. Therefore, a complete method for reconstruction of the sea surfaces in the presence of breaking waves is proposed and validated.The detection of breaking waves on the images and their reprojection on reconstructed surface is also discussed. Although too few acquisitions are available to draw firm results, an overview of the various observable parameters through the use of stereo video is given.This work shows the importance of stereo video systems to a better observation and understanding of the breaking waves, required in order to improve dissipation source term in spectral wave models.