NU 2020-022
INVENTORS Srutarshi Banerjee Henry Chopp Juan Gabriel Serra Pérez Zihao Wang Olliver Cossairt Aggelos Katsaggelos*
SHORT DESCRIPTION Method for high-resolution imaging in bandwidth constrained-applications
BACKGROUND In a world which is increasingly being dominated by cloud-based computer architectures, internet bandwidth capabilities between the remote users and the cloud are often the limiting factors in performance. This is particularly relevant for remote imaging applications, which are quite bandwidth intensive. Imaging under low bandwidth connections involves video compression-decompression, which adversely affects transmitted video resolution. One solution is to eliminate the transfer of redundant portions of videos or reduce the image quality, so that bandwidth is reserved for particular ROIs (regions of interest). However, in a dynamic activity as video streaming, correctly identifying redundancies remains a challenge for such adaptive video acquisition techniques.
ABSTRACT Northwestern researchers have developed a new technology that utilizes an adaptive host (high computational power) and a chip (high-resolution focal plane array with low computational power) for video transmission via a low-bandwidth communication channel. The chip, specifically, segments video frames into quadtree (QT) segments and then transmits QT-segmented video frames to the host. The limited channel bandwidth between the host and chip introduces a distortion in the video frames due to QT compression. Subsequently, the host computes the optimal QT reconstruction by minimizing a weighted rate distortion equation using Viterbi algorithm with the user-defined weights, thereby allowing for adaptive acquisition.Acquisition performance is measured using MOTA (multiple object tracking accuracy) as a metric. This work, which is one of the first in its kind by virtue of its end-to-end manner, has significant applications in surveillance, object tracking and defense applications.
APPLICATIONS
ADVANTAGES
PUBLICATIONS Banerjee S, Serra J, Chopp H, Cossairt O and Katsaggelos A (2019) An Adaptive Video Acquisition Scheme for Object Tracking. 2019 27th European Signal Processing Conference.
IP STATUS A provisional patent application has been filed.