Image enhancement plays an important role in image processing and analysis. Among various enhancement algorithms, Retinex-based algorithms can efficiently enhance details and have been widely adopted. Since Retinex-based algorithms regard illumination removal as a default preference and fail to limit the range of reflectance, the naturalness of non-uniform illumination images cannot be effectively preserved. However, naturalness is essential for image enhancement to achieve pleasing perceptual quality. In order to preserve naturalness while enhancing details, we propose an enhancement algorithm for non-uniform illumination images. In general, this paper makes the following three major contributions. First, a lightness-order-error measure is proposed to access naturalness preservation objectively. Second, a bright-pass filter is proposed to decompose an image into reflectance and illumination, which, respectively, determine the details and the naturalness of the image. Third, we propose a bi-log transformation, which is utilized to map the illumination to make a balance between details and naturalness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can not only enhance the details but also preserve the naturalness for non-uniform illumination images.

A major bottleneck of pedestrian detection lies on the sharp performance deterioration in the presence of small-size pedestrians that are relatively far from the camera. Motivated by the observation that pedestrians of disparate spatial scales exhibit distinct visual appearances, we propose in this paper an active pedestrian detector that explicitly operates over multiple-layer neuronal representations of the input still image. More specifically, convolutional neural nets, such as ResNet and faster R-CNNs, are exploited to provide a rich and discriminative hierarchy of feature representations, as well as initial pedestrian proposals. Here each pedestrian observation of distinct size could be best characterized in terms of the ResNet feature representation at a certain layer of the hierarchy. Meanwhile, initial pedestrian proposals are attained by the faster R-CNNs techniques, i.e., region proposal network and follow-up region of interesting pooling layer employed right after the specific ResNet convolutional layer of interest, to produce joint predictions on the bounding-box proposals' locations and categories (i.e., pedestrian or not). This is engaged as an input to our active detector, where for each initial pedestrian proposal, a sequence of coordinate transformation actions is carried out to determine its proper x-y 2D location and the layer of feature representation, or eventually terminated as being background. Empirically our approach is demonstrated to produce overall lower detection errors on widely used benchmarks, and it works particularly well with far-scale pedestrians. For example, compared with 60.51% log-average miss rate of the state-of-the-art MS-CNN for far-scale pedestrians (those below 80 pixels in bounding-box height) of the Caltech benchmark, the miss rate of our approach is 41.85%, with a notable reduction of 18.66%.

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Rate-control plays an important role in video coding. However, in the conventional rate-control algorithms, the number and position of Macroblocks (MBs) inside one basic unit for rate-control is inflexible and predetermined. The different characteristics of the MBs are not fully considered. Also, there is no overall optimization of the coding of basic units. This paper proposes a new region-based rate-control scheme for H.264/AVC to improve the coding efficiency. The inter-frame information is explored to objectively divide one frame into multiple regions based on their rate-distortion behaviors. The MBs with the similar characteristics are classified into the same region, and the entire region instead of a single MB or a group of contiguous MBs is treated as a basic unit for rate-control. A linear rate-quantization stepsize model and a linear distortion-quantization stepsize model are proposed to accurately describe the rate-distortion characteristics for the region-based basic units. Moreover, based on the above linear models, an overall optimization model is proposed to obtain suitable Quantization Parameters (QPs) for the region-based basic units. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed region-based rate-control approach can achieve both better subjective and objective quality by performing the rate-control adaptively with the content, compared to the conventional rate-control approaches.

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