Perceptual video coding method based on JND and AR model

In order to achieve better perceptual coding quality while using fewer bits, a novel perceptual video coding method based on the just-noticeable-distortion （JND） model and the auto-regressive （AR） model is explored. First, a new texture segmentation method exploiting the JND profile is devised to detect and classify texture regions in video scenes. In this step, a spatial-temporal JND model is proposed and the JND energy of every micro-block unit is computed and compared with the threshold. Secondly, in order to effectively remove temporal redundancies while preserving high visual quality, an AR model is applied to synthesize the texture regions. All the parameters of the AR model are obtained by the least-squares method and each pixel in the texture region is generated as a linear combination of pixels taken from the closest forward and backward reference frames. Finally, the proposed method is compared with the H.264/AVC video coding system to demonstrate the performance. Various sequences with different types of texture regions are used in the experiment and the results show that the proposed method can reduce the bit-rate by 15% to 58% while maintaining good perceptual quality.

Bleeding with the artificial heart: Gastrointestinal hemorrhage in CF-LVAD patients

Continuous-flow left ventricular assist devices(CF-LVADs)have significantly improved outcomes for patients with end-stage heart failure when used as a bridge to cardiac transplantation or,more recently,as destination therapy.However,its implantations carries a risk of complications including infection,device malfunction,arrhythmias,right ventricular failure,thromboembolic disease,postoperative and nonsurgical bleeding.A significant number of left ventricular assist devices(LVAD)recipients may experience recurrent gastrointestinal hemorrhage,mainly due to combination of antiplatelet and vitamin K antagonist therapy,activation of fibrinolytic pathway,acquired von Willebrand factor deficiency,and tendency to develop small intestinal angiodysplasias due to increased rotary speed of the pump.Gastrointestinal bleeding in LVAD patients remains a source of increased morbidity including the need for blood transfusions,extended hospital stays,multiple readmissions,and overall mortality.Management of gastrointestinal bleeding in LVAD patients involves multidisciplinary approach in stabilizing the patients,addressing risk factors and performing structured endoluminal evaluation with focus on upper gastrointestinal tract including jejunum to find and eradicate culprit lesion.Medical and procedural intervention is largely successful and universal bleeding cessation occurs in transplanted patients.

Robust Watermarking of Mobile Video Resistant against Barrel Distortion

In head mounted display(HMD),in order to cancel pincushion distortion,the images displayed on the mobile should be prewarped with barrel distortion.The copyright of the mobile video should be verified on both the original view and the pre-warped virtual view.A robust watermarking resistant against barrel distortion for HMDs is proposed in this paper.Watermark mask is embedded into image in consideration of imperceptibility and robustness of watermarking.In order to detect watermark from the pre-warped image with barrel distortion,an estimation method of the barrel distortion is proposed for HMDs.Then,the same warp is enforced on the embedded watermark mask with the estimated parameters of barrel distortion.The correlation between the warped watermark and the pre-warped image is computed to predicate the existence of watermark.As shown in experimental results,watermark of mobile video can be detected not only from the original views,but also from the pre-warped virtual view.It also shows that the proposed scheme is resistant against combined barrel distortion and common post-processing,such as JPEG compression.

Advances in endoscopic balloon therapy for weight loss and its limitations

The field of medical and surgical weight loss is undergoing an explosion of new techniques and devices. A lot of these are geared towards endoscopic approaches rather than the conventional and more invasive laparoscopic or open approach. One such recent advance is the introduction of intrgastric balloons. In this article, we discuss the recently Food and Drug Administration approved following balloons for weight loss: the Orbera? Intragastric Balloon System(Apollo Endosurgery Inc, Austin, TX, United States), the Re Shape? Integrated Dual Balloon System(Re Shape Medical, Inc., San Clemente, CA, United States), and the Obalon(Obalon? Therapeutics, Inc.). The individual features of each of these balloons, the method of introduction and removal, and the expected weight loss and possible complications are discussed. This review of the various balloons highlights the innovation in the field of weight loss.

Advanced imaging and visualization in gastrointestinal disorders

Advanced medical imaging and visualization has a strong impact on research and clinical decision making in gastroenterology. The aim of this paper is to show how imaging and visualization can disclose structural and functional abnormalities of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Imaging methods such as ultrasonography, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), endoscopy, endosonography, and elastography will be outlined and visualization with Virtual Reality and haptic methods. Ultrasonography is a versatile method that can be used to evaluate antral contractility, gastric emptying, transpyloric flow, gastric configuration, intragastric distribution of meals, gastric accommodation and strain measurement of the gastric wall. Advanced methods for endoscopic ultrasound, three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound, and tissue Doppler (Strain Rate Imaging) provide detailed information of the GI tract. Food hypersensitivity reactions including gastrointestinal reactions due to food allergy can be visualized by ultrasonography and MRI. Development of multi-parametric and multi-modal imaging may increase diagnostic benefits and facilitate fusion of diagnostic and therapeutic imaging in the future.

STUDY OF MISMATCHED FILTERING OF PASSIVE RADAR USING TV SIGNAL

This letter delnonstrates the structure of the passive radar using TV signals. Because the TV signal is a kind of pseudoperiodic signal, the matched filtering of color TV signals would yield high sidelobes which cause the range ambiguity. To overcome this problem, the mismatched filter is proposed to suppress the correlation sidelobcs of matched filtering of TV signals. By utilizing the iteration process, this method could achieve the required peak sidclobc level. The impacts of the noise and target movement on mismatched filtering are also analysed, Simulation results are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

Iconography of National Mourning in Polish Press

By the law, the highest-ranking state officials announce national mouming in response to death of prominent persons. The concept of mourning should be understood both as way of showing grief in public spaces and a period of time. In turn, the concept of iconography means a collection of illustrations, paintings, prints, drawings relating to a person, place or topic. President of Poland, his wife and other 94 people died in the Smolensk plane crash on April 10, 2010, thus the images of plane crash and its outcome published in different segments of Polish press are the subject of the article. Research based on methods such as interpretation of composition and semiotics. I started my analysis with a few hypotheses： （1） The cultural background, especially religious, determines the mourning visual representation; （2） The result of certain style of visualization can be constructing of a political myth; （3） Different means can be used by mass media in adapting culture patterns process; （4） Different photographic genres can be used to illustrate the mourning; and （5） Press segments differ in way/style of mourning visualization.

Substantial hepatic necrosis is prognostic in fulminant liver failure

To evaluate if any association existed between the extent of hepatic necrosis in initial liver biopsies and patient survival.METHODSThirty-seven patients with fulminant liver failure, whose liver biopsy exhibited substantial necrosis, were identified and included in the study. The histological and clinical data was then analyzed in order to assess the relationship between the extent of necrosis and patient survival, with and without liver transplantation. The patients were grouped based on the etiology of hepatic necrosis. Each of the etiology groups were then further stratified according to whether or not they had received a liver transplant post-index biopsy, and whether or not the patient survived.RESULTSThe core tissue length ranged from 5 to 44 mm with an average of 23 mm. Causes of necrosis included 14 autoimmune hepatitis, 10 drug induced liver injury (DILI), 9 hepatitis virus infection, and 4 unknown origin. Among them, 11 showed submassive (26%-75% of the parenchymal volume) and 26 massive (76%-100%) necrosis. Transplant-free survival was worse in patients with a higher extent of necrosis (40%, 71.4% and 100% in groups with necrosis of 76%-100%, 51%-75% and 26%-50%, respectively). Additionally, transplant-free survival rates were 66.7%, 57.1%, and 25.0% in groups of autoimmune hepatitis, DILI, and viral hepatitis, respectively. Even after liver transplantation, the survival rate in patients as a result of viral hepatitis remained the lowest (80%, 100%, and 40% in groups of autoimmune hepatitis, DILI, and viral hepatitis, respectively).CONCLUSIONAdequate liver biopsy with more than 75% necrosis is associated with significant transplant-free mortality that is critical in predicting survival.

Multiresolution Fusion of Remote Sensing Images Based on Resolution Degradation Model

A new method based on resolution degradation model is proposed to improve both spatial and spectral quality of the synthetic images. Some ETM+ panchromatic and multispectral images are used to assess the new method. Its spatial and spectral effects are evaluated by qualitative and quantitative measures and the results are compared with those of IHS, PCA, Brovey, OWT(Orthogonal Wavelet Transform) and RWT(Redundant Wavelet Transform). The results show that the new method can keep almost the same spatial resolution as the panchromatic images, and the spectral effect of the new method is as good as those of wavelet-based methods.

A rate-distortion optimized rate shaping scheme for H.264 data partitioned video bitstream

To enable quality sealability and further improve the reconstructed video quallty m rate shaping, a rate-distortion optimized packet dropping scheme for H. 264 data partitioned video bitstream is proposed in this paper. Some side information is generated for each video bitstream in advance, while streaming such side information is exploited by a greedy algorithm to optimally drop partitions in a rate-distortion optimized way. Quality sealability is supported by adopting data partition instead of whole frame as the dropping unit. Simulation resuhs show that the proposed scheme achieves a great gain in the reconstructed video quality over two typical frame dropping schemes, with the help of the fine granularity in dropping unit as well as rate-distortion optimization.

ADAPTIVE RECONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUE FOR THE LOST INFORMATION OF THE RECTANGULAR IMAGE AREA

The adaptive reconstruction for the lost information of the rectangular image area is very important for the robust transmission and restoration of the image. In this paper, a new reconstruction method based on the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain has been put forward. According to the low pass character of the human visual system and the energy distribution of the DCT coefficients on the rectangular boundary, the DCT coefficients of the rectangular image area are adaptively selected and recovered. After the Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT), the lost information of the rectangular image area can be reconstructed. The experiments have demonstrated that the subjective and objective qualities of the reconstructed images are enhanced greatly than before.

A Comparative Visualization Strategy of Probabilistic Susceptibility Maps for Analyzing Different Types of Slope Failures

This paper presents a comparative visualization strategy of slope failure susceptibility maps for analyzing different types of simultaneous occurrences of slope failures. Through the SEM （structural equation modeling）, slope failure susceptibility maps are produced by using causal factors （i.e., geographical information, satellite remotely sensed data）. As for a conventional pair-wise comparative procedure, the differences between susceptibility maps are delineated on difference maps, that can be, however, applied for evaluating differences only between pairs of susceptibility maps. One of the strong requirements from specialists working on slope stability evaluation is a comparative and visualization strategy of susceptibility maps with respect to ＂different types of simultaneous slope failures＂, for which the discussion is insufficient in the previous research activities for constructing the quantitative models for slope failure hazard mapping. As a measure, a color composite map based on susceptibility maps has been produced. The combination of assigning susceptibility maps to RGB-color planes is determined based on an index of ＂NCCT （normalized correlated color temperature）＂ which represents the relationship between chromaticity and human visual perception. Through the cases examined, the result indicates that the proposed color composite map, as a heuristic visualization strategy, is useful for simultaneously evaluating the hazardous areas affected by ＂different types of slope failures＂.

A Rate-distortion Based Quantization Level Adjustment Algorithm in Block-based Video Compression

In this paper, a rate-distortion based quantization level adjustment （RDQLA） algorithm is presented. Based on the rate-distortion criterion, the quantization level adjustment algorithm effectively improves coding efficiency by adaptively optimizing quantization levels of the signals near the boundaries of quantization cells and adjusting quantization levels per block. In addition, it has no overhead and is fully compatible with the existing compression standards. The proposed algorithm can be applied in any block based image and video coding method. In particular, the algorithm has been verified on the platform of H.264. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves objective and subjective performances substantially. It is shown that the proposed algorithm has a gain of several dB comparing with the newest H.264 standard for high bit rates.

Nonthermal Hawking radiation from NUT-Taub-like black hole

Using Damour-Ruffini method,we investigate Hawking radiation from NUT-Taub-like(NT-like) black hole.Considering the total energy conservation and the back reaction of the particle to the spacetime,we get the radiation spectrum on the black hole event horizon,which is related to the change of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.Meanwhile,we find that the radiation is not exactly thermal,and can take out information from the black hole,which can be used to explain the information loss paradox.The result that we get satisfies the unitary theory of quantum mechanics and is consistent with the work finished before.

Dominant edge direction based fast intra mode decision in the H.264/AVC encoder

The H.264/AVC video coding standard uses an intra prediction mode with 4×4 and 16×16 blocks for luma and 8×8 blocks for chroma. This standard uses the rate distortion optimization (RDO) method to determine the best coding mode based on the compression performance and video quality. This method offers a large improvement in coding efficiency compared to other compression standards, but the computational complexity is greater due to the various intra prediction modes. This paper proposes a fast intra mode decision algorithm for real-time encoding of H.264/AVC based on the dominant edge direction (DED). The DED is extracted using pixel value summation and subtraction in the horizontal and vertical directions. By using the DED, three modes instead of nine are chosen for RDO calculation to decide on the best mode in the 4×4 luma block. For the 16×16 luma and the 8×8 chroma, only two modes are chosen instead of four. Experimental results show that the entire encoding time saving of the proposed algorithm is about 67% compared to the full intra search method with negligible loss of quality.