The paper proposes a constant bit rate (CBR) control algorithm for motion JPEG2000 (MJ2). In MJ2 coding, every frame can be coded at similar target bitrate due to the accurate rate control feature. Moreover, frames of the same scene have the similar rate-distortion (RD) characters. The proposed method estimates the initial cutoff threshold of the current frame according to the previous frame's RD information. This iterative method reduces computational cost significantly. As opposed to previous algorithms, it can be used at any compression ratio. Experiments show that the performance is comparable to normal JPEG2000 coding.

This letter proposes a spread spectrum audio watermarking robust against playback speed modification (PSM) attack which introduces both time-scale modification and pitch shifting. Two important improvements are exploited to achieve this robustness. The first one is selecting an embedding region according to the stable characteristic of the audio energy. The second one is stretching the pseudo-random noise sequence to match the length of the embedding region before embedding and detection. Experimental results show that our method is highly robust to common audio signal processing attacks and synchronization attacks including PSM, cropping, trimming and jittering.

Lane detection plays an important role in Driver Assistance Systems and Autonomous Vehicle System. In this paper, we propose a parallel-snake model combined with balloon force for lane detection. Parallel-snake is defined as two open active contours with parallel constrain. The lane boundaries on the left and right sides are assumed as parallel curves, parallel-snake is deformed to estimate these two boundaries. As lane regions between left and right boundaries usually have low gradient, snake will lose external force on these regions. Furthermore, inspired by balloon active contour model, the balloon force is introduced into parallel-snake to expand two parallel curves from center of road to the left and right lane boundaries. Different from closed active contour, stretching force is adopted to prevent the head and tail of snake from converging together. The experimental results on three different datasets show that parallel-snake model can work well on images with shadows and handle the lane with broken boundaries as the parallel property.

In this letter we propose a robust detection algorithm for audio watermarking for copyright protection. The watermark is embedded in the time domain of an audio signal by the normally used spread spectrum technique. The scheme of detection is an improvement of the conventional correlation detector. A high-pass filter is applied along with the linear prediction error filter for whitening the audio signal and an adaptive threshold is chosen for decision comparing. Experimental results show that our detection algorithm outperforms the conventional one not only because it improves the robustness to normal attacks but also because it can provide the robustness to time-invariant pitch-scale modification.

This letter proposes a new algorithm of refining the quantization parameter in H.264 real-time encoding. In the H.264 encoding, the quantization parameter computed according to the quadratic rate model is not accurate in meeting the target bit rate. In order to make the actual encoded bit rate closer to the target bit rate, ρ-domain rate model is introduced in our proposed quantization parameter refinement algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves obvious gain in PSNR and has stabler encoded bit rate compared to Jiang's algorithm.

The frame-level R-D optimization in H.264 is very important in video storage scenarios. Among all of the sub-optimal algorithms, a greedy iteration algorithm (GIA) can best lower the computational complexity of frame-level R-D optimization. In order to further lower the computational complexity, a ρ-domain frame-level R-D optimization algorithm is proposed in this letter. Different from GIA, every frame's rate and distortion can be estimated accurately without actual encoding in our proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can lower the computational complexity greatly with negligible variation in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) compared with GIA.

This paper proposes two efficient rate control algorithms for Motion JPEG2000. Both methods provide accurate visual quality control under buffer constraints. Frames of the same scene usually have the similar rate-distortion (R-D) characters. The proposed methods predict the R-D models of uncoded frames forwardly or bilaterally according to those of coded frames. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms offer visual quality improvements over similar competing methods and save a large amount of memory simultaneously.

The selection of motion vectors plays an important role in the error propagation process between inter-frames. In this letter, an end-to-end prediction error calculation method is proposed and is used for the rate-distortion optimized selection of motion vectors. Simulation results show that the robustness of encoded video streams under error-prone environment is improved.