Facial Scanning With a Digital Camera: A Novel Way of Screening for Primary Angle Closure.

PURPOSE: We hypothesize that patients with primary angle closure (PAC) have common significant facial characteristics that set them apart from an age-matched, sex-matched, and race-matched control population. The primary objective of this study was to test whether a 3-dimensional (3D) camera could pick up these differences in order to differentiate PAC patients from controls. PATIENTS: A total of 55 patients with PAC and 38 controls were included in the study. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Cases and controls had their facial photographs taken using a 3-dimensional digital camera (3dMdFace System). The facial features in the captured photographs were analyzed using a computer software (Neural Network Toolbox). A regression formula was devised to show whether these facial parameters could be used to distinguish between patients and controls. RESULTS: Thirteen facial parameters were measured, and using a regression formula and neural network classification we were able to mathematically distinguish patients from controls using this method of screening. CONCLUSIONS: PAC patients have distinct facial features that may be differentiated from those of normal individuals mathematically using 3D photography. There is potential for this 3D facial scanning technology in screening for PAC in the general population.

Rotated orthogonal transform (ROT) for motion-compensation residual coding.

Discrete cosine transform (DCT) is the orthogonal transform that is most commonly used in image and video compression. The motion-compensation residual (MC-residual) is also compressed with the DCT in most video codecs. However, the MC-residual has different characteristics from a nature image. In this paper, we develop a new orthogonal transform-rotated orthogonal transform (ROT) that can perform better on the MC-residual than the DCT for coding purposes. We derive the proposed ROT based on orthogonal-constrained L1-Norm minimization problem for its sparse property. Using the DCT matrix as the starting point, a better orthogonal transform matrix is derived. In addition, by exploring inter-frame dependency and local motion activity, transmission of substantial side information is avoided. The experiment results confirm that, with small computation overhead, the ROT is adaptive to change of local spatial characteristic of MC-residual frame and provides higher compression efficiency for the MC-residual than DCT, especially for high- and complex-motion videos.

Mode-dependent templates and scan order for H.264/AVC-based intra lossless coding.

In H.264/advanced video coding (AVC), lossless coding and lossy coding share the same entropy coding module. However, the entropy coders in the H.264/AVC standard were original designed for lossy video coding and do not yield adequate performance for lossless video coding. In this paper, we analyze the problem with the current lossless coding scheme and propose a mode-dependent template (MD-template) based method for intra lossless coding. By exploring the statistical redundancy of the prediction residual in the H.264/AVC intra prediction modes, more zero coefficients are generated. By designing a new scan order for each MD-template, the scanned coefficients sequence fits the H.264/AVC entropy coders better. A fast implementation algorithm is also designed. With little computation increase, experimental results confirm that the proposed fast algorithm achieves about 7.2% bit saving compared with the current H.264/AVC fidelity range extensions high profile.

Low-complexity video coding based on two-dimensional singular value decomposition.

In this paper, we propose a low-complexity video coding scheme based upon 2-D singular value decomposition (2-D SVD), which exploits basic temporal correlation in visual signals without resorting to motion estimation (ME). By exploring the energy compaction property of 2-D SVD coefficient matrices, high coding efficiency is achieved. The proposed scheme is for the better compromise of computational complexity and temporal redundancy reduction, i.e., compared with the existing video coding methods. In addition, the problems caused by frame decoding dependence in hybrid video coding, such as unavailability of random access, are avoided. The comparison of the proposed 2-D SVD coding scheme with the existing relevant non-ME-based low-complexity codecs shows its advantages and potential in applications.