In recent years, with the development of autonomous driving, 3D reconstruction for unbounded large-scale scenes has attracted researchers' attention. Existing methods have achieved outstanding reconstruction accuracy in autonomous driving scenes, but most of them lack the ability to edit scenes. Although some methods have the capability to edit scenarios, they are highly dependent on manually annotated 3D bounding boxes, leading to their poor scalability. To address the issues, we introduce a new Gaussian representation, called DrivingEditor, which decouples the scene into two parts and handles them by separate branches to individually model the dynamic foreground objects and the static background during the training process. By proposing a framework for decoupled modeling of scenarios, we can achieve accurate editing of any dynamic target, such as dynamic objects removal, adding and etc, meanwhile improving the reconstruction quality of autonomous driving scenes especially the dynamic foreground objects, without resorting to 3D bounding boxes. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset and KITTI benchmarks demonstrate the performance in 3D reconstruction for both dynamic and static scenes. Besides, we conduct extra experiments on unstructured large-scale scenarios, which can more convincingly demonstrate the performance and robustness of our proposed model when rendering the unstructured scenes. Our code is available at https://github.com/WangXu-xxx/DrivingEditor.

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to produce planning trajectories from raw sensors directly. Currently, most approaches integrate perception, prediction, and planning modules into a fully differentiable network, promising great scalability. However, these methods typically rely on deterministic modeling of online maps in the perception module for guiding or constraining vehicle planning, which may incorporate erroneous perception information and further compromise planning safety. To address this issue, we delve into the importance of online map uncertainty for enhancing autonomous driving safety and propose a novel paradigm named UncAD. Specifically, UncAD first estimates the uncertainty of the online map in the perception module. It then leverages the uncertainty to guide motion prediction and planning modules to produce multi-modal trajectories. Finally, to achieve safer autonomous driving, UncAD proposes an uncertainty-collision-aware planning selection strategy according to the online map uncertainty to evaluate and select the best trajectory. In this study, we incorporate UncAD into various state-of-the-art (SOTA) end-to-end methods. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that integrating UncAD, with only a 1.9% increase in parameters, can reduce collision rates by up to 26% and drivable area conflict rate by up to 42%. Codes, pre-trained models, and demo videos can be accessed at https://github.com/pengxuanyang/UncAD.

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to reconstruct the reward function from expert demonstrations to facilitate policy learning, and has demonstrated its remarkable success in imitation learning. To promote expert-like behavior, existing IRL methods mainly focus on learning global reward functions to minimize the trajectory difference between the imitator and the expert. However, these global designs are still limited by the redundant noise and error propagation problems, leading to the unsuitable reward assignment and thus downgrading the agent capability in complex multi-stage tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Curricular Subgoal-based Inverse Reinforcement Learning (CSIRL) framework, that explicitly disentangles one task with several local subgoals to guide agent imitation. Specifically, CSIRL firstly introduces decision uncertainty of the trained agent over expert trajectories to dynamically select specific states as subgoals, which directly determines the exploration boundary of different task stages. To further acquire local reward functions for each stage, we customize a meta-imitation objective based on these curricular subgoals to train an intrinsic reward generator. Experiments on the D4RL and autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed methods yields results superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts, as well as better interpretability. Our code is publicly available athttps://github.com/Plankson/CSIRL.

Normally, modeling 3D face is an effective way for pose-invariant recognition, yet its expensive computation significantly discourages potential applications. In this paper, a simple and fully automatic panoramic image-based pose-invariant face recognition method is proposed to present excellent accuracy with low complexity. In this paper, a face shape model with local morphing treatment is first constructed and considered as the alignment standard to deal with all of the possible geometric distortion problems. During the recognition phase, a proposed systematically designed algorithm with morphing and the selection function are both utilized to significantly ease the negative effects of various poses within ±45° in yaw and ±22.5° in pitch. As demonstrated in experimental results, a similar accuracy as that of the 3D start-of-the-arts is achieved with much less computational complexity.

Existing learning-based atmospheric particle-removal approaches such as those used for rainy and hazy images are designed with strong assumptions regarding spatial frequency, trajectory, and translucency. However, the removal of snow particles is more complicated because they possess additional attributes of particle size and shape, and these attributes may vary within a single image. Currently, hand-crafted features are still the mainstream for snow removal, making significant generalization difficult to achieve. In response, we have designed a multistage network named DesnowNet to in turn deal with the removal of translucent and opaque snow particles. We also differentiate snow attributes of translucency and chromatic aberration for accurate estimation. Moreover, our approach individually estimates residual complements of the snow-free images to recover details obscured by opaque snow. Additionally, a multi-scale design is utilized throughout the entire network to model the diversity of snow. As demonstrated in the qualitative and quantitative experiments, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based atmospheric phenomena removal methods and one semantic segmentation baseline on the proposed Snow100K dataset. The results indicate our network would benefit applications involving computer vision and graphics.

A contrast enhancement method termed stratified parametric-oriented histogram equalization (SPOHE) is proposed to effectively provide a regional enhanced effect without visual artifacts, e.g., halo or blocking artifacts, which is normally incurred in the former simplified enhancement methods. First, the stratified sampling theory is applied to uniformly sample the original image through many divided strata with the size defined by the two parameters (α, β). Second, the required statistical information is efficiently derived through the integral image concept. Finally, the corrected SPOHE is also proposed to further improve the contrast with limited tradeoff computations. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme yields a cumulative distribution function similar to the actual one for an accurate contrast enhancement performance while significantly reducing the computational complexity. Moreover, compared with the former speed-oriented methods, good contrast and artifact-free results can be achieved simultaneously.

Recent studies on category relations have shown the promising progress in addressing classification problems. Existing works independently consider the known relation and classifier optimization, and thus restrain the room for performance improvement. In this work, a new loss function is proposed to leverage the underlining relations among categories and classifiers. In addition, the bipolar relation (BR) graph is employed to formulate a general form for diverse relations. This bipolar graph is automatically learnt for reliving the constraints which may happen during the cost minimization. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks with various hypotheses and graphs demonstrate that our method can offer a significant performance improvement by jointly learning from both BR graph and hypothesis, in particular on a small training dataset scenario that suffers from severe overfitting problem.

Block truncation coding (BTC) has been considered as a highly efficient compression technique for decades, but the blocking artifact is its main issue. The halftoning-based BTC has significantly eased this issue, yet an apparent impulse noise artifact is accompanied. In this study, an improved BTC, termed adaptive dot-diffused BTC (ADBTC), is proposed to further improve the visual quality. Also, this method provides an additional flexibility on the compression ratios determination in contrast to the former fixed and few number of configuration possibilities. As documented in the experimental results, the proposed method achieves the superior image quality regarding the five various objective IQA methods. As a result, it is a very competitive approach for the needs of both high frame rate and high-resolution image compression.

Digital multitoning is an extension of halftoning for rendering more than two tones at each pixel for higher image quality. Although a lot of effort has been put in generating dispersed dots previously, the blue-noise feature can hardly be achieved for those printers utilizing the electrophotography (EP) process to avoid the physically unstable isolated dots. To overcome this issue, Chandu et al. proposed a screening method for yielding green-noise dot clusters, yet noisy multitone texture was accompanied. This degrades the visual quality and the stability of tone rendering. In this paper, a significantly improved homogeneity of clustered dots can be achieved by the proposed screening method based upon the new inter-iterative clustered-dot direct multi-bit search algorithm. Compared with the former approaches, the inter-iteration design leads to less error by the updated initial multitone patterns. As demonstrated in the experimental results, both of the high homogenous multitone texture and less noisy perception at all absorptance levels are offered in contrast to the former Chandu et al.'s results. The high-quality output proves it as a very competitive candidate for EP printers, e.g., laser printers.

Processing efficiency can be a key factor which dominates the value of a commercial product and its value-added application such as security. In this study, a computationally reduced halftoning-based watermarking is proposed. In encoder, the Efficient Direct Binary Search (EDBS) is employed to generate reference table to ensure the output is in halftone format. Subsequently, a number of optimized compressive tables with various texture angles are established for subsequent table lookup. In decoder, the Least-Mean-Square (LMS) enlarges the differences among those phenotypes of the embedded angles and the required number of dimensions for each angle. Finally, the naïve Bayes classifier is employed to collect the possibility information for classifying various angles. As documented in the experimental results, good image quality and correct detect rate can be obtained simultaneously. Moreover, a high processing efficiency of 0.6 milliseconds for an image of size 512×512 can also be achieved, which can substantially increase the commercial competitive strength in printing market, in particular the security issue is well addressed.

In this study, an improved Block Truncation Coding (BTC) image compression scheme, namely Near-Aperiodic Dot-Diffused BTC (NADDBTC), is described. Firstly, the existing regular structures for the generation of bitmap are completely modified for aperiodic compressed results. Moreover, an adaptive quantization levels selection strategy and two parameters Class Matrix (CM) and Diffused Matrix (DM) for image compression are developed and co-optimized. The improvements produce results of superior image quality. Furthermore, the adaptive quantization levels are introduced for balanced false contour, impulsive noise, and blocking artifact. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed NADDBTC is capable of providing excellent image quality and visual perception, as well as processing efficiency, similar to DDBTC by exploiting the innate parallelism advantage of dot diffusion.

Error diffusion is an efficient halftone method for mainly being applied on printers. The promising high image quality and processing efficiency endorse it as a popular and competitive candidate in halftoning and multitoning applications. The multitoning is an extension of halftoning, adopting more than two-tone levels for the improvement of the similarity between an original image and the converted image. Yet, the banding effect, indicating the areas with discontinuous tone level, disturbs the visual perception, and thus seriously degrades image quality. To solve the banding effect, the tone-replacement strategy is proposed in this paper. As documented in the experimental results, excellent tone-similarity as that of the original image and promising reconstructed dot-distribution can be provided simultaneously. Comparing with the former banding-free methods, the apparent improvements/features suggest that the proposed method can be a very competitive candidate for multitoning applications.

Compared with the error diffusion, dot diffusion provides an additional pixel-level parallelism for digital halftoning. However, even though its periodic and blocking artifacts had been eased by the previous works, it was still far from satisfactory in terms of the blue noise spectrum perspective. In this paper, we strengthen the relation among the pixel locations of the same processing order by an iterative halftoning method, and the results demonstrate a significant improvement. Moreover, a new approach of deriving the averaged power spectrum density is proposed to avoid the regular sampling of the well-known Bartlett's procedure which inaccurately presents the halftone periodicity of certain halftoning techniques with parallelism. As a result, the proposed dot diffusion is substantially superior to the state-of-the-art parallel halftoning methods in terms of visual quality and artifact-free property, and competitive runtime to the theoretical fastest ordered dithering is offered simultaneously.

Formerly, dimensionality reduction techniques are effective ways for extracting statistical significance of features from their original dimensions. However, the dimensionality reduction also induces an additional complexity burden which may encumber the real efficiency. In this paper, a technique is proposed for the reduction of the dimension of samples rather than the features in the former schemes, and it is able to additionally reduce the computational complexity of the applied systems during the reduction process. This method effectively reduces the redundancies of a sample, in particular for those objects which possess partially symmetric property, such as human face, pedestrian, and license plate. As demonstrated in the experiments, based upon the premises of faster speeds in training and detection by a factor of 4.06 and 1.24, respectively, similar accuracies to the ones without considering the proposed method are achieved. The performance verifies that the proposed technique can offer competitive practical values in pattern recognition related fields.

Block truncation coding (BTC) has been considered a highly efficient compression technique for decades. However, its inherent artifacts, blocking effect and false contour, caused by low bit rate configuration are the key problems. To deal with these, an improved BTC, namely dot-diffused BTC (DDBTC), is proposed in this paper. Moreover, this method can provide excellent processing efficiency by exploiting the nature parallelism advantage of the dot diffusion, and excellent image quality can also be offered through co-optimizing the class matrix and diffused matrix of the dot diffusion. According to the experimental results, the proposed DDBTC is superior to the former error-diffused BTC in terms of various objective image quality assessment methods as well as processing efficiency. In addition, the DDBTC also shows a significant image quality improvement comparing with that of the former ordered-dither BTC.

A prior work proposed by Chung-Wu considered an edge-based lookup table to obtain good inversed image quality, yet it suffers from some drawbacks in terms of image quality, memory consumption, and complexity. In this correspondence, an improved scheme is proposed to deal with these issues.

In this study, a local contrast enhancement method, namely Parametric-Oriented Histogram Equalization (POHE), is proposed to effectively yield enhanced results. In general, the grayscale distribution of a specific region in an image can be modeled with a kernel function such as the Gaussian, and thus the corresponding estimated cumulative distribution function (cdf) can be considered as the transformation function for contrast enhancement. The required parameters, however, still need to access all of the pixels in the corresponding region, and thus consume a huge amount of computations. To cope with this, the concept of integral image is adopted to effectively derive the required parameters. In the experimental results, former well-known speed-oriented methods are adopted for comparison, and the results demonstrate that the proposed methods can provide high practical value for biometric and tracking/detection these active issues who desire high efficiency.

This paper presents a new face gender recognition scheme by enjoying the benefit from the dot diffusion among weak classifiers in recognition phase for a low resolution and non-aligned thumbnail image. The main problem of the former Adaboost approaches is that each weak classifier simply offers a binary decision, which fails to compensate the decision error by diffusing it to the rest weak classifiers. To cope with this, this work exploits the dot-diffused-based Adaboost to solve this problem. As documented in the experimental results, with the examination of Feret and CMU databases, this paper has shown that the proposed scheme is an effective candidate in improving the recognition accuracy rate and the efficiency of the overall system process for face gender recognition.

Moving object detection is an important and fundamental step for intelligent video surveillance systems because it provides a focus of attention for post-processing. A multilayer codebook-based background subtraction (MCBS) model is proposed for video sequences to detect moving objects. Combining the multilayer block-based strategy and the adaptive feature extraction from blocks of various sizes, the proposed method can remove most of the nonstationary (dynamic) background and significantly increase the processing efficiency. Moreover, the pixel-based classification is adopted for refining the results from the block-based background subtraction, which can further classify pixels as foreground, shadows, and highlights. As a result, the proposed scheme can provide a high precision and efficient processing speed to meet the requirements of real-time moving object detection.

Look-up table (LUT) halftoning is an efficient way to construct halftone images and approximately simulate the dot distribution of the learned halftone image set. In this paper, a general mechanism named multiple look-up table (MLUT) halftoning is proposed to generate the halftones of direct binary search (DBS), whereas the high efficient characteristic of the LUT is still preserved. In the MLUT, the standard deviation is adopted as an important feature to classify various tables. In addition, the proposed quick standard deviation evaluation is employed to yield an extremely low computational complexity in calculating the standard deviation. In the parameter optimization, the autocorrelation is adopted because it can fully characterize the periodicity of dot distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that the dot distribution generated by the proposed method approximates to that of the DBS, which enables the proposed scheme as a very competitive candidate in the copying and printing industry.

In this paper, a new class tiling designed dot diffusion along with the optimized class matrix and diffused matrix are proposed. The result of this method presents a nearly periodic-free halftone when compared to the former schemes. Formerly, the class matrix of the dot diffusion is duplicated and orthogonally tiled to fulfill the entire image for further thresholding and quantized-error diffusion, which accompanies subsequent periodic artifacts. In our observation, this artifact can be solved by manipulating the class tiling with comprising rotation, transpose, and alternatively shifting of the class matrices. As documented in the experimental results, the proposed dot diffusion has been compared with the former halftoning methods with parallelism in terms of image quality, processing efficiency, periodicity, and memory consumption; the proposed dot diffusion exhibits as a very competitive candidate in the printing/display market.

In this paper, a classified-based post-compensation algorithm for Color Filter Array (CFA) demosaicing is proposed. This technique can be used for improving the image quality of the interpolated results obtained by other CFA images. First, each pixel is classified according to its neighborhood texture variance and angle. Then, different Least-Mean-Square (LMS) filters are trained to adopt for dealing pixels of various characteristics. As documented in the experimental results, the proposed scheme can substantially boost the image quality; in addition, a better visual perceptual can be obtained. Notably, the proposed method can be considered as effective post-compensation by applying for any former schemes to yield an even better image quality.

In this paper, a halftoning-based watermarking scheme with high data capacity and image quality is presented. Three types of watermarks of various pixel-depths, including 1-bit, 2-bit, and 3-bit, are able to be embedded without prominently damaging the image quality. To achieve high marked image quality, the parallel-oriented high efficient Direct Binary Search (DBS) halftoning is adopted to cooperate with the proposed Orientation Modulation (OM) method. In the decoder, the Least-Mean-Square-trained (LMS-trained) filters are adopted to extract the features of marked images in the frequency domain, and the naïve Bayes classifier is employed to analyze the extracted features and further decode the watermark information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DBS-based OM encoding scheme provides excellent image quality, high processing efficiency, and high robustness to adapt to practical printing application.

In this paper, the impact of the lips for facial recognition is investigated. In the first stage of the proposed system, a Fast Box Filtering (FBF) is proposed to generate a noise-free source with high processing efficiency. Afterward, five various mouth corners are detected though the proposed system, in which it is also able to resist beard and rotation problems. For the feature extraction, two geometric ratios and 10 parabolic related parameters are adopted for further recognition through the Support Vector Machine (SVM). Experimental results demonstrate that when the number of subjects is fewer or equal to 36, the Correct Accept Rate (CAR) is greater than 98%, and the False Accept Rate (FAR) is smaller than 0.064% (CAR>;95.6%, FAR<;0.083%| #Subjects ≤ 54). Moreover, the processing speed of the overall system achieves 34.43 fps (frame/sec) which meets the real-time requirement.

Look-Up Table (LUT) halftoning is an efficient way to construct halftone images, and approximately simulate the dot distribution of the learned halftone image set. In this study, a general mechanism named Multiple Look-Up Table (MLUT) halftoning is proposed to generate the halftones of Direct Binary Search (DBS), while the high efficient characteristic of the LUT is still preserved. In the MLUT, the standard deviation is adopted as an important feature to classify various tables. Moreover, the proposed Quick Standard Deviation Evaluation (QSDE) is employed to yield an extremely low computational complexity in calculating the standard deviation. In the parameter optimization, the autocorrelation is adopted since it can fully characterize the periodicity of dot distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that the visual quality of the proposed method can approximate to that of the DBS which is considered as the best halftoning in terms of image quality, which enable the proposed scheme as a very competitive candidate in coping printing industry.

This paper presents an improved hand tracking system using pixel-based hierarchical-feature AdaBoosting (PBHFA), skin color segmentation, and codebook (CB) background cancelation. The proposed PBH feature significantly reduces the training time by a factor of at least 1440 compared to the traditional Haar-like feature. Moreover, lower computation and high tracking accuracy are also provided simultaneously. Yet, one of the disadvantages of the PBHFA is the false positive which is the consequence of the appearance of complex background in positive samples. To effectively reduce the false positive rate, the skin color segmentation and the foreground detection by applying the CB model are catered for rejecting all of the candidates which are not hand targets. As documented in the experimental results, the proposed system can achieve promising results, and thus it can be considered as an effective candidate in handling practical applications which require hand postures.

Block truncation coding (BTC) is an efficient compression technique with extremely low computational complexity. However, the blocking and false contour effects are two major deficiencies in BTC which cause severe perceptual artifacts. The former scheme, error-diffused BTC (EDBTC), can significantly improve the above issues through the visual low-pass compensation on the bitmap, which thus widens its possible application market, yet the corresponding security issue may limit its value. In this paper, a method namely complementary hiding EDBTC is developed to cope the above issue. This paper is managed by firstly discussing when a single watermark is embedded, and then multiple watermarks are employed to test the limitation of the proposed scheme. Herein, an adaptive external bias factor is employed to control the watermark embedding, and this factor also affects the image quality and robustness simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method only requires an extremely small external bias factor to carry watermarks, which enables a high capacity scenario without significantly damaging image quality.

In this paper, a halftoning-based watermarking method is presented. This method enables high pixel-depth watermark embedding, while maintaining high image quality. This technique is capable of embedding watermarks with pixel depths up to 3 bits without causing prominent degradation to the image quality. To achieve high image quality, the parallel oriented high-efficient direct binary search (DBS) halftoning is selected to be integrated with the proposed orientation modulation (OM) method. The OM method utilizes different halftone texture orientations to carry different watermark data. In the decoder, the least-mean-square-trained filters are applied for feature extraction from watermarked images in the frequency domain, and the naïve Bayes classifier is used to analyze the extracted features and ultimately to decode the watermark data. Experimental results show that the DBS-based OM encoding method maintains a high degree of image quality and realizes the processing efficiency and robustness to be adapted in printing applications.

In this paper, the impact of the lips for identity recognition is investigated. In fact, it is a challenging issue for identity recognition solely by the lips. In the first stage of the proposed system, a fast box filtering is proposed to generate a noise-free source with high processing efficiency. Afterward, five various mouth corners are detected through the proposed system, in which it is also able to resist shadow, beard, and rotation problems. For the feature extraction, two geometric ratios and ten parabolic-related parameters are adopted for further recognition through the support vector machine. Experimental results demonstrate that, when the number of subjects is fewer or equal to 29, the correct accept rate (CAR) is greater than 98%, and the false accept rate (FAR) is smaller than 0.066%. (CAR > 95.02%, FAR < 0.095% # Subjects ≤ 57). Moreover, the processing speed of the overall system achieves 34.43 frames per second, which meets the real-time requirement. Thus, the proposed system can be an effective candidate for facial biometrics applications when other facial organs are covered or when it is applied for an access control system.

This paper presents an approach for personal identification using hand geometrical features, in which the infrared illumination device is employed to improve the usability of this hand recognition system. In the proposed system, prospective users can place their hands freely in front of the camera without any pegs or templates. The system can also work in normal environment, since no dark background is required. The idea behind the proposed system is to locate the tip of the middle finger and then rotate the palm image according to the tip point. Moreover, additional 12 important points are further identified and 30 features are defined from the information of those points. In addition, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) was used for distinguishing various hands. Experimental result shows an average Correct Identification Rate (CIR) of 98.75%, which is an encouraging consequence for a contact-free hand geometry identification system.

This paper presents a hierarchical scheme with block-based and pixel-based codebooks for foreground detection. The codebook is mainly used to compress information to achieve a high efficient processing speed. In the block-based stage, 12 intensity values are employed to represent a block. The algorithm extends the concept of the block truncation coding, and thus it can further improve the processing efficiency by enjoying its low complexity advantage. In detail, the block-based stage can remove most of the backgrounds without reducing the true positive rate, yet it has low precision. To overcome this problem, the pixel-based stage is adopted to enhance the precision, which also can reduce the false positive rate. Moreover, the short-term information is employed to improve background updating for adaptive environments. As documented in the experimental results, the proposed algorithm can provide superior performance to that of the former related approaches.

For image-based data hiding, it is difficult to achieve good image quality when high embedding capacity and 100% data extraction are also demanded. In this study, the proposed method, namely, overall minimal-error searching (OMES) is developed to meet the aforementioned requirements. Moreover, the concept of secret sharing is also adopted to distribute watermarks into multiple halftone images, and the embedded information can only be extracted when all of the marked images are gathered. The OMES modifies the halftone values at the same position of all host images with the trained substitution table (S-Table). The S-Table makes the original combination of these halftone values as another meaningful combination for embedding watermark, which is the key part in determining the image quality. Thus, an optimization procedure is proposed to achieve the optimized S-Table. Two different encoders, called error-diffused-based and least-mean-square-based approaches are also developed to cooperate with the proposed OMES to cope with high processing speed and high image quality applications, respectively. Finally, for resisting the issues caused by the print-and-scan attack, such as zooming, rotation, and dot gain effect, a compensation correction procedure is also proposed. As demonstrated in the experimental results, the proposed approach provides good image quality, and is able to guard against some frequent happened attacks in printing applications.

This study proposes a method which can generate high quality inverse halftone images from halftone images. This method can be employed prior to any signal processing over a halftone image or the inverse halftoning used in JBIG2. The proposed method utilizes the least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm to establish a relationship between the current processing position and its corresponding neighboring positions in each type of halftone image, including direct binary search, error diffusion, dot diffusion, and ordered dithering. After which, a referenced region called a support region (SR) is used to extract features. The SR can be obtained by relabeling the LMS-trained filters with the order of importance. Moreover, the probability of black pixel occurrence is considered as a feature in this work. According to this feature, the probabilities of all possible grayscale values at the current processing position can be obtained by the Bayesian theorem. Consequently, the final output at this position is the grayscale value with the highest probability. Experimental results show that the proposed method offers better visual quality than that of Mese-Vaidyanathan's and Chang et al's methods in terms of human-visual peak signal-to-noise ratio (HPSNR). In addition, the memory consumption is also superior to Mese-Vaidyanathan's method.

Former research on inverse halftoning most focus on developing a general-purpose method for all types of halftone patterns, such as error diffusion, ordered dithering, etc., while fail to consider the natural discrepancies among various halftoning methods. To achieve optimal image quality for each halftoning method, the classification of halftone images is highly demanded. This study employed the least mean-square filter for improving the robustness of the extracted features, and employed the naive Bayes classifier to verify all the extracted features for classification. Nine of the most well-known halftoning methods were involved for testing. The experimental results demonstrated that the classification performance can achieve a 100% accuracy rate, and the number of distinguishable halftoning methods is more than that of a former method established by Chang and Yu.

In this paper, a low computational complexity method is proposed to embed a multi-tone visual pattern using the concept of secret sharing. One halftone image is obtained using regular error diffusion, and the other image is obtained using the proposed Generalized Noise-Balanced Error Diffusion (GNBEDF) in considering the properties of the watermark and the first halftone image in the same time. With the proposed method, the bi-level watermark embedding becomes a special case to this technology. The bi-level watermark decoding can be simply achieved via printing the two halftone images onto two transparencies and then superimposing them together to reveal the watermark pattern. However, as the multi-tone watermark is involved, the proposed Gaussian Difference (GD) approach is needed to perform the decoding to produce a decoded multi-tone watermark. Throughout this work, a lowpass filter obtained by Least-Mean-Square is employed to assess the image quality.

Block Truncation Coding (BTC) has been considered as a highly efficient compression technique for decades. However, the annoying blocking effect and false contour under low bit rate configuration are its key problems. In this work, an improved BTC, namely Dot-Diffused BTC (DDBTC), is proposed to solve these problems. On one hand, the DDBTC can provide excellent processing efficiency by exploiting the innate parallelism advantage of dot diffusion. On the other hand, the DDBTC can provide excellent image quality by co-optimizing the class matrix and diffused matrix of the dot diffusion. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DDBTC is fully superior to the pervious Error-Diffused BTC (EDBTC) in terms of image quality and processing efficiency, and has much better image quality than that of the Ordered-Dither BTC (ODBTC).

In this paper, a watermarking scheme, called majority-parity-guided error-diffused block truncation coding (MPG-EDBTC), is proposed to achieve high image quality and embedding capacity. EDBTC exploits the error diffusion to effectively reduce blocking effect and false contour which inherently exhibit in traditional BTC. In addition, the coding efficiency is significantly improved by replacing high and low means evaluation with extreme values substitution. The proposed MPG-EDBTC embeds a watermark simultaneously during compression by evaluating the parity value in a predefined parity-check region (PCR). As documented in the experimental results, the proposed scheme can provide good robustness, image quality, and processing efficiency. Finally, the proposed MPG-EDBTC is extended to embed multiple watermarks and achieves excellent image quality, robustness, and capacity. Nowadays, most multimedia is compressed before it is stored. It is more appropriate to embed information such as watermarks during compression. The proposed method has been proved to solve effectively the inherent problems in traditional BTC, and provide excellent performance in watermark embedding.

In this paper, a watermarking scheme, called Majority-Parity-Guided Error-Diffused Block Truncation Coding (MPG-EDBTC), is proposed to achieve with high image quality and embedded capacity. The main problem of traditional BTC is its poor quality over configurations of high compression ratio. To overcome such problem, the extreme pixel values are employed to substitute both high and low means. The quantized error is also compensated by adjusting the neighboring pixels. With these strategies, the image quality and processing efficiency are improved. Moreover, the watermark is embedded by evaluating the parity value in a pre-defined Parity-Check Region (PCR). As seen in the experimental results, the proposed scheme can provide good robustness, image quality, and processing efficiency. Finally, the proposed MPG-EDBTC is extended to embed multiple watermarks and achieves excellent image quality, robustness, and capacity as well. Nowadays, most multimedia is stored in compressed format. It is more appropriate to embed information such as watermarks in compressed domain. The proposed method has been proved to solve effectively the inherent problems in traditional BTC, and provide excellent performance in watermark embedding.

Dot diffusion is an efficient approach which utilizes concepts of block-wise and parallel-oriented processing to generate halftones. However, the block-wise nature of processing reduces image quality much more significantly as compared to error diffusion. In this work, four types of filters with various sizes are employed in co-optimization procedures with class matrices of size 8 n 8 and 16 x 16 to improve the image quality. The optimal diffused weighting and area are determined through simulations. Many well-known halftoning methods, some of which includes direct binary search (DBS), error diffusion, ordered dithering, and prior dot diffusion methods, are also included for comparisons. Experimental results show that the proposed dot diffusion achieved quality close to some forms of error diffusion, and additionally, superior to the well-known Jarvis and Stucki error diffusion and Mese's dot diffusion. Moreover, the inherent parallel processing advantage of dot diffusion is preserved, allowing us to reap higher executing efficiency than both DBS and error diffusion.

In this work, a high quality halftone image obtained by dot diffusion is proposed to reduce the deficiency gap with the error diffusion. Four kinds of filters with various sizes obtained by Least-Mean-Square (LMS) are also introduced to simulate the human visual system (HVS). These filters are employed in the optimization procedures for class matrix of size 8x8. According to numerous of simulations, an optimized diffused weighting is determined. Many well-known halftone methods, which include direct binary search (DBS), error diffusion, ordered dithering, and previous dot diffusion are also involved for comparisons. As demonstrated in the experiments, the quality of the proposed dot diffusion is close to some error diffusion and is even superior to the well-known Jarvis and Stucki error diffusion or Mese’s dot diffusion. Moreover, the dot diffusion inherently has the parallel processing advantage, which provides much higher executing efficiency than DBS or error diffusion.