This paper discusses a method of designing linear phase two-channel filter banks for integer wavelet transform. We show that the designed filter banks are easily structed as the lifting form by leading relationship between designed filters and lifting structure. The designed integer wavelets are applied to image compression to verify the efficiency of our method.

An FFT-based full-search block matching algorithm (BMA) is described that uses the sum of squared differences (SSD) criterion. The proposed method does not have to extend a real signal into complex one. This reduces the computational load of FFT approaches. In addition, if two macroblocks share the same search window, they can be matched at the same time. In a simulation of motion estimation, the proposed method achieved the same performance as a direct SSD full search and its processing speed is faster than other FFT-based BMAs.

We focus on the feature transform approach as one methodology for biometric template protection, where the template consists of the features extracted from the biometric trait. This study considers some properties of the unitary (including orthogonal) transform-based template protection in particular. It is known that the Euclidean distance between the templates protected by a unitary transform is the same as that between original (non-protected) ones as a property. In this study, moreover, it is shown that it provides the same results in l2-norm minimization problems as those of original templates. This means that there is no degradation of recognition performance in authentication systems using l2-norm minimization. Therefore, the protected templates can be reissued multiple times without original templates. In addition, a DFT-based template protection scheme is proposed as an unitary transform-based one. The proposed scheme enables to efficiently generate protected templates by the FFT, in addition to the useful properties. It is also applied to face recognition experiments to evaluate the effectiveness.

We propose a motion estimation algorithm using less gray level images, which are composed of bits pixels lower than 8 bits pixels. Threshold values for generating low bits pixels from 8 bits pixels are simply determined as median values of pixels in a macro block. The proposed algorithm reduces the computational complexity of motion estimation at less expense of video quality. Moreover, median cut quantization can be applied to multilevel images and combined with a lot of fast algorithms to obtain more effective algorithms.

A robust identification scheme for JPEG images is proposed in this paper. The aim is to robustly identify JPEG images that are generated from the same original image, under various compression conditions such as differences in compression ratios and initial quantization matrices. The proposed scheme does not provide any false negative matches in principle. In addition, secure features, which do not have any visual information, are used to achieve not only a robust identification scheme but also secure one. Conventional schemes can not avoid providing false negative matches under some compression conditions, and are required to manage a secret key for secure identification. The proposed scheme is applicable to the uploading process of images on social networks like Twitter for image retrieval and forensics. A number of experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed method outperforms conventional ones in terms of query performances, while keeping a reasonable security level.

An effective method for lossless video compression using intra-frame coding algorithms is described. Intra-frame coding is mainly used for still image compression and does not exploit a temporal correlation in video sequences. With the proposed method, multiple frames are combined into one large picture by interleaving all pixel data. In a large generated picture, the temporal correlation of the video sequence is transformed into a spatial correlation. A large picture enables images to be coded more efficiently and decreases the bitrate for lossless coding using intra-frame coding. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this method by encoding video sequences using JPEG 2000 and JPEG-LS.

A scheme of error correction for JPEG2000 codestream is proposed in this paper. The scheme uses a forward error correction code (FEC) and a data hiding technique. The headers and the higher quality layers of the codestream are coded using FEC codes. Then the parity data are separated from the FEC-coded data and hidden in the JPEG2000 codestream. The hidden data are used for error correction at the decoder. Several error correction codes with different strength are selected for the main header, the tile-part headers, the packet headers, and the bodies. The codestream generated by the proposed scheme has backward compatibility with a standard JPEG2000 codestream. Thus, it can be decoded with a general decoder. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In this paper, we propose a function that provides scalability of image quality on the basis of regions of interest for JPEG2000 coding. Functions of this type are useful in the progressive transmission of images, where the aim is to more quickly decode regions of interest than backgrounds. The conventional methods of progressive transmission have mainly been based on SNR scalability or on resolution scalability. With these conventional functions, it is impossible to achieve region-based scalability in the progressive transmission of images. The proposed methods use the ROI and SNR layer structures of JPEG2000, so the methods are suitable for the region-progressive transmission of JPEG2000 images.

A method of error concealment for JPEG2000 images is proposed in this paper. The proposed method uses the layer structure that is a feature of the JPEG2000. The most significant layer is hidden in the lowest layer of the JPEG2000 bit stream, and this embedded layer is used for error concealment. The most significant layer is duplicated because JPEG2000 uses bit-plane coding. In this coding, when the upper layers are affected by errors, the coefficients of the lower layers become meaningless. A bit stream encoded using the proposed method has the same data structure as a standard JPEG2000. Therefore, it can be decoded by a standard decoder. Our simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This study evaluates the effects of some non-learning blind bandwidth extension (BWE) methods on state-of-the-art automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems. Recently, a non-linear bandwidth extension (N-BWE) method has been proposed as a blind, non-learning, and light-weight BWE approach. Other non-learning BWEs have also been developed in recent years. For ASV evaluations, most data available to train ASV systems is narrowband (NB) telephone speech. Meanwhile, wideband (WB) data have been used to train the state-of-the-art ASV systems, such as i-vector, d-vector, and x-vector. This can cause sampling rate mismatches when all datasets are used. In this paper, we investigate the influence of sampling rate mismatches in the x-vector-based ASV systems and how non-learning BWE methods perform against them. The results showed that the N-BWE method improved the equal error rate (EER) on ASV systems based on the x-vector when the mismatches were present. We researched the relationship between objective measurements and EERs. Consequently, the N-BWE method produced the lowest EERs on both ASV systems and obtained the lower RMS-LSD value and the higher STOI score.

In many applications of digital video database systems such as digital library, video data is often compressed with MPEG video algorithms. It will be an important technique to insert the additional information data like indexes and contents effectively into video database which is compressed with MPEG, because we can always deal with the additional information with video data itself easily. We propose a method for inserting optional binary data such as index information of digital library into MPEG-1 and -2 bitstreams. The binary data inserted MPEG video bitstreams using our proposed scheme are also according to the specification of the MPEG video frame structure. The proposed method allows us to extract the inserted binary data perfectly though MPEG-1 and -2 video are lossy algorithms. And the quality of decoded images after extracting added information is almost the same as that of ordinary MPEG bitstreams. Furthermore, traditional standard MPEG-1 and -2 video decoder which can not extract inserted binary data can also decode images from the binary data inserted MPEG video bitstreams without obvious image degradation. There are some different points between the proposed insertion technique of the binary data and the watermarking technique. The technique of watermarking prepares to deal with alter watermarking by others. And the technique of watermarking is required for the identification of the signature and the perfect extraction of the inserted image signature is not required in the lossy MPEG video environment. On the other hand, we have to extract all of the inserted binary information data correctly with the insertion technique of the binary information. Simulations using MPEG video sequences with inserted binary data are presented to quantify some performance factors concerned. We have not heard about inserting data method which purpose is such as index and content information insertion.

We propose an image identification scheme for double-compressed encrypted JPEG images that aims to identify encrypted JPEG images that are generated from an original JPEG image. To store images without any visual sensitive information on photo sharing services, encrypted JPEG images are generated by using a block-scrambling-based encryption method that has been proposed for Encryption-then-Compression systems with JPEG compression. In addition, feature vectors robust against JPEG compression are extracted from encrypted JPEG images. The use of the image encryption and feature vectors allows us to identify encrypted images recompressed multiple times. Moreover, the proposed scheme is designed to identify images re-encrypted with different keys. The results of a simulation show that the identification performance of the scheme is high even when images are recompressed and re-encrypted.

We propose an efficient two-layer near-lossless coding method using an extended histogram packing technique with backward compatibility to the legacy JPEG standard. The JPEG XT, which is the international standard to compress HDR images, adopts a two-layer coding method for backward compatibility to the legacy JPEG standard. However, there are two problems with this two-layer coding method. One is that it does not exhibit better near-lossless performance than other methods for HDR image compression with single-layer structure. The other problem is that the determining the appropriate values of the coding parameters may be required for each input image to achieve good compression performance of near-lossless compression with the two-layer coding method of the JPEG XT. To solve these problems, we focus on a histogram-packing technique that takes into account the histogram sparseness of HDR images. We used zero-skip quantization, which is an extension of the histogram-packing technique proposed for lossless coding, for implementing the proposed near-lossless coding method. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method exhibits not only a better near-lossless compression performance than that of the two-layer coding method of the JPEG XT, but also there are no issue regarding the combination of parameter values without losing backward compatibility to the JPEG standard.

We propose two methods for avoiding the checkerboard distortion which is caused by finite word length error. The first method derives the bit length of filter coefficients required for avoiding the checkerboard distortion under a certain word length. In the second method, the checkerboard distortion can be avoided by using the cascade structure which consists of zero-hold kernel and a time-invariant filter factorized from a filter with structure for avoiding the checkerboard distortion under linear systems. It is demonstrated by simulations that we can avoid the checkerboard distortion by using these proposed methods.

In this paper, we propose a combined use of transformed images and vision transformer (ViT) models transformed with a secret key. We show for the first time that models trained with plain images can be directly transformed to models trained with encrypted images on the basis of the ViT architecture, and the performance of the transformed models is the same as models trained with plain images when using test images encrypted with the key. In addition, the proposed scheme does not require any specially prepared data for training models or network modification, so it also allows us to easily update the secret key. In an experiment, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of performance degradation and model protection performance in an image classification task on the CIFAR-10 dataset.

This paper describes an effective technique for coding QCIF video sequences based on a JPEG2000 codec. In the proposed method, multiple frames are combined into one large picture. The larger picture enables images to be coded more efficiently. Image quality is further improved by combining the frames symmetrically. The video sequence is efficiently coded by adapting the time correlation of the video sequences to spatial correlation. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this method by encoding QCIF video sequences using JPEG2000.

JPEG2000 compression standard considers a block of wavelet coefficients, called codeblock, as the smallest coding unit that being independently entropy-coded. In this paper, we propose a codeblock-based concealment technique for JPEG2000 images to mitigate missing codeblock due to packet loss in network transmission. The proposed method creates a single JPEG2000 codestream from an image that composed of several subsampled versions of the original image and transmit the codestream over a single channel.The technique then substitutes the affected codeblock in a subsampled image with a copy of the corresponding codeblock obtained from other subsampled images. Thus, it does not require an iterative processing, which is time consuming, to construct an estimated version of the lost data. Moreover, it is applicable for a large codeblock size and can be implemented either in wavelet or codestream domain. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, a super-resolution method based on the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is proposed for a signal with some frequency damage. If the damage process can be modeled as linear convolutoin with a type 1 linear phase FIR filter, it is shown that some DCT coefficients of the damaged signal are the same as those of the original signal except for the DCT coefficients corresponding to the frequency damage. From this investigation, the proposed method is provided for the DCTs with four types as expanding the super-resolution method based on the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). In addition,two magnification approaches based on the proposed method are described to improve the conventional approach.

A pipelined adaptive digital filter (ADF) architecture based on a two-dimensional least mean square algorithm is proposed. This architecture enables the ADF to be operated at a high clock rate and reduction of the required amount of hardware. To achieve this reduction we introduce a new building unit, called a block, and propose implementing the pipelined ADF using the block, Since the number of blocks in a cell is adjustable, we derive a condition for satisfying given specifications. We show the smallest number of blocks and the corresponding delay can be determined by using the proposed method.