Depth Map Coding Using Histogram-Based Segmentation and Depth Range Updating

( Chunyu Lin ),( Yao Zhao ),( Jimin Xiao ),( Tammam Tillo ) 한국인터넷정보학회 2015 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.9 No.3

In texture-plus-depth format, depth map compression is an important task. Different from normal texture images, depth maps have less texture information, while contain many homogeneous regions separated by sharp edges. This feature will be employed to form an efficient depth map coding scheme in this paper. Firstly, the histogram of the depth map will be analyzed to find an appropriate threshold that segments the depth map into the foreground and background regions, allowing the edge between these two kinds of regions to be obtained. Secondly, the two regions will be encoded through rate distortion optimization with a shape adaptive wavelet transform, while the edges are lossless encoded with JBIG2. Finally, a depth-updating algorithm based on the threshold and the depth range is applied to enhance the quality of the decoded depth maps. Experimental results demonstrate the effective performance on both the depth map quality and the synthesized view quality.

Multiple Description Coding for H.264/AVC With Redundancy Allocation at Macro Block Level

Chunyu Lin,Tillo, Tammam,Yao Zhao,Byeungwoo Jeon IEEE 2011 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDE Vol.21 No.5

<P>In this paper, a novel multiple description video coding scheme is proposed to insert and control the redundancy at macro block (MB) level. By analyzing the error propagation paths, the relative importance of each MB is determined. The paths, in practice, depend on both the video content and the adopted video coder. Considering the relative importance of the MB and the network status, an unequal protection for the video data can be realized to exploit the redundancy effectively. In addition, a simple and effective approach is introduced to tune the quantization parameter for the variable rate coding case. The whole scheme is implemented in H.264/AVC by employing its coding options, thus generating descriptions that are compatible with the baseline profile and extended profile of H.264/AVC. Due to its general property, the proposed approach can be employed for other hybrid video codecs. The results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach over other H.264/AVC multiple description schemes.</P>

Anatomical Adaptations of the Xerophilous Medicinal Plant, Capparis spinosa, to Drought Conditions

Lu Gan,Chunyu Zhang,Yongtai Yin,Zhiwei Lin,Yongwei Huang,Jun Xiang,Chunhua Fu,Maoteng Li 한국원예학회 2013 Horticulture, Environment, and Biotechnology Vol.54 No.2

Capparis spinosa is a plant that grows in dry and arid environments. As far as can be ascertained, no comprehensive studies on how the leaf, stem and root structures adapt to drought conditions have been published to date. In this paper, a study into the anatomical adaptations of the leaf, stem and root of C. spinosa to drought environments was conducted using in vitro cultured seedlings as control. The results showed that C. spinosa could change its leaf, stem, and root structures when adapting to drought conditions. The plant growing under drought conditions possessed an enlarged transit region between the stem and root where the xylem and fibro-vascular system had increased in order to enhance water absorption and storage capacity. The leaf, stem and root of C. spinosa under drought conditions were better developed than those under normal in vitro culture conditions. The leaf possessed uniform mesophyll cells and three or four layers of palisade mesophyll cells on both sides of the mature leaves. The stomata were evenly distributed across both sides of the leaf, and they remained open continually during the day throughout the summer growing period, especially those on the lower leaf surface. The xylem in the stem was extremely well developed with wide vessels and much thicker cortical layers. All these characteristics can enhance the adaptability of C. spinosa and enable it to survive in extremely dry and arid areas.

Fast Intraframe Coding for High Efficiency Video Coding

( Han Huang ),( Yao Zhao ),( Chunyu Lin ),( Huihui Bai ) 한국인터넷정보학회 2014 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.8 No.3

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a new video coding standard that can provide much better compression efficiency than its predecessor H.264/AVC. However, it is computationally more intensive due to the use of flexible quadtree coding unit structure and more choices of prediction modes. In this paper, a fast intraframe coding scheme is proposed for HEVC. Firstly, a fast bottom-up pruning algorithm is designed to skip the mode decision process or reduce the candidate modes at larger block size coding unit. Then, a low complexity rough mode decision process is adopted to choose a small candidate set, followed by early DC and Planar mode decision and mode filtering to further reduce the number of candidate modes. The proposed method is evaluated by the HEVC reference software HM8.2. Averaging over 5 classes of HEVC test sequences, 41.39% encoding time saving is achieved with only 0.77% bitrate increase.

Resolution-independent Up-sampling for Depth Map Using Fractal Transforms

( Meiqin Liu ),( Yao Zhao ),( Chunyu Lin ),( Huihui Bai ),( Chao Yao ) 한국인터넷정보학회 2016 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.10 No.6

Due to the limitation of the bandwidth resource and capture resolution of depth cameras, low resolution depth maps should be up-sampled to high resolution so that they can correspond to their texture images. In this paper, a novel depth map up-sampling algorithm is proposed by exploiting the fractal internal self-referential feature. Fractal parameters which are extracted from a depth map, describe the internal self-referential feature of the depth map, do not introduce inherent scale and just retain the relational information of the depth map, i.e., fractal transforms provide a resolution-independent description for depth maps and could up-sample depth maps to an arbitrary high resolution. Then, an enhancement method is also proposed to further improve the performance of the up-sampled depth map. The experimental results demonstrate that better quality of synthesized views is achieved both on objective and subjective performance. Most important of all, arbitrary resolution depth maps can be obtained with the aid of the proposed scheme.

Auto-Covariance Analysis for Depth Map Coding

( Lei Liu ),( Yao Zhao ),( Chunyu Lin ),( Huihui Bai ) 한국인터넷정보학회 2014 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.8 No.9

Efficient depth map coding is very crucial to the multi-view plus depth (MVD) format of 3-D video representation, as the quality of the synthesized virtual views highly depends on the accuracy of the depth map. Depth map contains smooth area within an object but distinct boundary, and these boundary areas affect the visual quality of synthesized views significantly. In this paper, we characterize the depth map by an auto-covariance analysis to show the locally anisotropic features of depth map. According to the characterization analysis, we propose an efficient depth map coding scheme, in which the directional discrete cosine transforms (DDCT) is adopted to substitute the conventional 2-D DCT to preserve the boundary information and thereby increase the quality of synthesized view. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves better performance than that of conventional DCT with respect to the bitrate savings and rendering quality.

Fast Algorithm for Intra Prediction of HEVC Using Adaptive Decision Trees

( Xing Zheng ),( Yao Zhao ),( Huihui Bai ),( Chunyu Lin ) 한국인터넷정보학회 2016 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.10 No.7

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard, as the latest coding standard, introduces satisfying compression structures with respect to its predecessor Advanced Video Coding (H.264/AVC). The new coding standard can offer improved encoding performance compared with H.264/AVC. However, it also leads to enormous computational complexity that makes it considerably difficult to be implemented in real time application. In this paper, based on machine learning, a fast partitioning method is proposed, which can search for the best splitting structures for Intra-Prediction. In view of the video texture characteristics, we choose the entropy of Gray-Scale Difference Statistics (GDS) and the minimum of Sum of Absolute Transformed Difference (SATD) as two important features, which can make a balance between the computation complexity and classification performance. According to the selected features, adaptive decision trees can be built for the Coding Units (CU) with different size by offline training. Furthermore, by this way, the partition of CUs can be resolved as a binary classification problem. Experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm can save over 34% encoding time on average, with a negligible Bjontegaard Delta (BD)-rate increase.

Involvement of Orai1 in tunicamycin-induced endothelial dysfunction

Yang, Hui,Xue, Yumei,Kuang, Sujuan,Zhang, Mengzhen,Chen, Jinghui,Liu, Lin,Shan, Zhixin,Lin, Qiuxiong,Li, Xiaohong,Yang, Min,Zhou, Hui,Rao, Fang,Deng, Chunyu The Korean Society of Pharmacology 2019 The Korean Journal of Physiology & Pharmacology Vol.23 No.2

Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress is mediated by disturbance of $Ca^{2+}$ homeostasis. The store-operated calcium (SOC) channel is the primary $Ca^{2+}$ channel in non-excitable cells, but its participation in agent-induced ER stress is not clear. In this study, the effects of tunicamycin on $Ca^{2+}$ influx in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) were observed with the fluorescent probe Fluo-4 AM. The effect of tunicamycin on the expression of the unfolded protein response (UPR)-related proteins BiP and CHOP was assayed by western blotting with or without inhibition of Orai1. Tunicamycin induced endothelial dysfunction by activating ER stress. Orai1 expression and the influx of extracellular $Ca^{2+}$ in HUVECs were both upregulated during ER stress. The SOC channel inhibitor SKF96365 reversed tunicamycin-induced endothelial cell dysfunction by inhibiting ER stress. Regulation of tunicamycin-induced ER stress by Orai1 indicates that modification of Orai1 activity may have therapeutic value for conditions with ER stress-induced endothelial dysfunction.

Involvement of Orai1 in tunicamycin-induced endothelial dysfunction

Hui Yang,Yumei Xue,Sujuan Kuang,Mengzhen Zhang,Jinghui Chen,Lin Liu,Zhixin Shan,Qiuxiong Lin,Xiaohong Li,Min Yang,Hui Zhou,Fang Rao,Chunyu Deng 대한약리학회 2019 The Korean Journal of Physiology & Pharmacology Vol.23 No.2

Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress is mediated by disturbance of Ca2+ homeostasis. The store-operated calcium (SOC) channel is the primary Ca2+ channel in non-excitable cells, but its participation in agent-induced ER stress is not clear. In this study, the effects of tunicamycin on Ca2+ influx in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) were observed with the fluorescent probe Fluo-4 AM. The effect of tunicamycin on the expression of the unfolded protein response (UPR)-related proteins BiP and CHOP was assayed by western blotting with or without inhibition of Orai1. Tunicamycin induced endothelial dysfunction by activating ER stress. Orai1 expression and the influx of extracellular Ca2+ in HUVECs were both upregulated during ER stress. The SOC channel inhibitor SKF96365 reversed tunicamycin-induced endothelial cell dysfunction by inhibiting ER stress. Regulation of tunicamycin-induced ER stress by Orai1 indicates that modification of Orai1 activity may have therapeutic value for conditions with ER stress-induced endothelial dysfunction.