Abstract: Neural networks can be successfully used for cross-component prediction in video coding. In particular, attention-based architectures are suitable for chroma intra prediction using luma information because of their capability to model relations between difierent channels. However, the complexity of such methods is still very high and should be further reduced, especially for decoding. In this paper, a cost-effective attention-based neural network is designed for chroma intra prediction. Moreover, with the goal of further improving coding performance, a novel approach is introduced to utilize more boundary information effectively. In addition to improving prediction, a simplification methodology is also proposed to reduce inference complexity by simplifying convolutions. The proposed schemes are integrated into H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) pipeline, and only one additional binary block-level syntax flag is introduced to indicate whether a given block makes use of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves up to −0.46%/−2.29%/−2.17% BD-rate reduction on Y/Cb/Cr components, respectively, compared with H.266/VVC anchor. Reductions in the encoding and decoding complexity of up to 22% and 61%, respectively, are achieved by the proposed scheme with respect to the previous attention-based chroma intra prediction method while maintaining coding performance.

Abstract: This paper introduces the use of single-layer and deep convolutional networks for remote sensing data analysis. Direct application to multi- and hyperspectral imagery of supervised (shallow or deep) convolutional networks is very challenging given the high input data dimensionality and the relatively small amount of available labeled data. Therefore, we propose the use of greedy layerwise unsupervised pretraining coupled with a highly efficient algorithm for unsupervised learning of sparse features. The algorithm is rooted on sparse representations and enforces both population and lifetime sparsity of the extracted features, simultaneously. We successfully illustrate the expressive power of the extracted representations in several scenarios: classification of aerial scenes, as well as land-use classification in very high resolution or land-cover classification from multi- and hyperspectral images. The proposed algorithm clearly outperforms standard principal component analysis (PCA) and its kernel counterpart (kPCA), as well as current state-of-the-art algorithms of aerial classification, while being extremely computationally efficient at learning representations of data. Results show that single-layer convolutional networks can extract powerful discriminative features only when the receptive field accounts for neighboring pixels and are preferred when the classification requires high resolution and detailed results. However, deep architectures significantly outperform single-layer variants, capturing increasing levels of abstraction and complexity throughout the feature hierarchy.

Abstract: Variable rate is a requirement for flexible and adaptable image and video compression. However, deep image compression methods (DIC) are optimized for a single fixed rate-distortion (R-D) tradeoff. While this can be addressed by training multiple models for different tradeoffs, the memory requirements increase proportionally to the number of models. Scaling the bottleneck representation of a shared autoencoder can provide variable rate compression with a single shared autoencoder. However, the R-D performance using this simple mechanism degrades in low bitrates, and also shrinks the effective range of bitrates. To address these limitations, we formulate the problem of variable R-D optimization for DIC, and propose modulated autoencoders (MAEs), where the representations of a shared autoencoder are adapted to the specific R-D tradeoff via a modulation network. Jointly training this modulated autoencoder and the modulation network provides an effective way to navigate the R-D operational curve. Our experiments show that the proposed method can achieve almost the same R-D performance of independent models with significantly fewer parameters.