The AV1 video compression format is developed by the Alliance for Open Media consortium. It achieves more than a 30% reduction in bit rate compared to its predecessor VP9 for the same decoded video quality. This article provides a technical overview of the AV1 codec design that enables the compression performance gains with considerations for hardware feasibility.

Seam feature point acquisition is the premise of the intelligent welding process such as initial point guiding and seam tracking. However, conventional seam feature point acquisition methods based on geometric feature have shortcomings of poor flexibility and robustness. In this article, a seam feature point acquisition method based on efficient convolution operator (ECO) and particle filter (PF) is proposed, which could be applied to different weld types and could achieve fast and accurate seam feature point acquisition even under the interference of welding arc light and spatter noises. First, a structured light vision sensor is developed to acquire welding image. Second, the ECO algorithm is adopted to track the seam region and acquire seam feature point during gas metal arc welding process. Third, the state and measurement equations of the weld seam position are established, and PF is applied to improve seam feature point acquisition accuracy. Finally, a welding experiment system is built and a series of seam feature point acquisition experiments of butt joint, lap joint, and fillet joint are carried out to validate the performance of the proposed method. The experiment results demonstrate that the processing speed of the proposed method could reach up 35 Hz, and the seam feature point acquisition errors are smaller than 0.15 mm, which could meet the real-time and accuracy requirement for subsequent initial point guiding and seam tracking.

Entropy coding is a lossless data compression technique that is widely applied in video codecs to encode syntax elements into bitstreams. Efficient entropy coding requires accurate prediction of the probability distribution of the encoded symbols. In AV1, multi-symbol arithmetic coding is adopted. The symbol probability is derived with handcrafted context models and lookup tables that store the predicted probabilities corresponding to different entropy contexts. The lookup table based scheme has some fundamental deficiencies. The entropy context features have to be discrete so that they can be used to index the lookup tables. To reduce the size of the lookup table, the number of contexts cannot be very large. Moreover, the probability distributions stored in the lookup tables are maintained separately without taking their correlations into consideration. In this paper, we propose a machine learning based scheme that achieves more accurate symbol probability prediction for entropy coding. The proposed approach is implemented in AV1 for the entropy coding of intra prediction modes. Experimental results demonstrate that it can improve the efficiency of entropy coding significantly.

Video Multi-method Assessment Fusion (VMAF) is a machine-learning based video quality metric. It is experimentally shown to provide higher correlation with human visual system as compared to conventional metrics like peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) in many scenarios and has drawn considerable interest as an alternative metric to evaluate the perceptual quality. This work proposes a systematic approach to improve the video compression performance in VMAF. It is composed of multiple components including a pre-processing stage with a complement automatic filter parameter selection, and a modified rate-distortion optimization framework tailored for VMAF metric. The proposed scheme achieves on average 37% BD-rate reduction in VMAF, as compared to conventional video codec optimized for PSNR.

Recently, laser vision sensors are widely applied in initial point alignment and seam tracking to improve the level of intelligent welding because of good characteristics. However, since the deformation of laser stripe is unobvious at the narrow weld with 0.2 mm width, these methods are not applicable for the narrow weld. Moreover, there are rare researches that could achieve initial point alignment and seam tracking of narrow weld simultaneously. Therefore, an initial point alignment and seam tracking system for narrow weld is proposed in this paper. At first, a laser vision sensor with extra light emitting diode light is used to obtain laser and weld seam image. Besides, the seam feature point is extracted and three-dimensional coordinates can be obtained with vision model. In addition, three controllers including decision controller, initial point alignment controller, and seam-tracking controller are proposed to achieve initial point alignment and seam tracking control in X- and Z-axis directions. Moreover, feature verification, Kalman filter, and output pulse verification are designed to improve the accuracy and stability of this system. Finally, many initial point alignment and seam-tracking experiments of narrow weld are conducted. Experimental results demonstrate that proposed system can well achieve initial point alignment and seam tracking of planar and curved surface narrow weld.

In this paper, we introduce a volumetric partitioning strategy based on a generalized sweeping framework to seamlessly partition the volume of an input triangle mesh into a collection of deformed cuboids. This is achieved by a user-designed volumetric harmonic function that guides the decomposition of the input volume into a sequence of two-manifold level sets. A skeletal structure whose corners correspond to corner vertices of a 2D parameterization is extracted for each level set. Corners are placed so that the skeletal structure aligns with features of the input object. Then, a skeletal surface is constructed by matching the skeletal structures of adjacent level sets. The surface sheets of this skeletal surface partition the input volume into the deformed cuboids. The collection of cuboids does not exhibit T-junctions, significantly simplifying the hexahedral mesh generation process, and in particular, it simplifies fitting trivariate B-splines to the deformed cuboids. Intersections of the surface sheets of the skeletal surface correspond to the singular edges of the generated hex-meshes. We apply our technique to a variety of 3D objects and demonstrate the benefit of the structure decomposition in data fitting.