An essential part of any activity recognition system claiming be truly real-time is the ability to perform feature extraction in real-time. We present, in this paper, a quite simple and computationally tractable approach for real-time human activity recognition that is based on simple statistical features. These features are simple and relatively small, accordingly they are easy and fast to be calculated, and further form a relatively low-dimensional feature space in which classification can be carried out robustly. On the Weizmann publicly benchmark dataset, promising results (i.e. 97.8%) have been achieved, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to the-state-of-the-art. Furthermore, the approach is quite fast and thus can provide timing guarantees to real-time applications.

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Total variation (TV) regularization is popular in image restoration and reconstruction due to its ability to preserve image edges. This paper, describes a new total variation based de-noising scheme. The proposed technique optimally finds the threshold level of the noisy image wavelet decomposition that minimizes the energy of the error between the restored and the noisy image. The minimization algorithm is regularized by including 1st as well as 2nd order derivatives effects of the noisy image, into the minimization scheme. Next, the problem of blind deconvolution of noisy images is addressed. First, the order of the blurring Point Spread Function (PSF), is accurately estimated using a de-noised version of the noisy blurred image. Then, the deconvolution algorithm is modified by including the effects of the 1 st as well as 2nd order derivatives of the blurred noisy images into the image update algorithm. Simulation …

This paper, presents an exact estimation of the PSF size for both noisy and noiseless images that is essential for good quality image restoration. Having accurately estimated the PSF, the paper also proposes a fast double updating algorithm for improving the quality of the restored image. It is based on minimizing some largest errors between the blurred image and its equivalent computed as the 2-D convolution of the estimated restored image and the estimated PSF. Simulation results have been given to verify that the proposed technique manages to correctly estimate the PSF size for noisy and noiseless cases as well as yielding a sharpened image with higher PSNR than classical approaches.

Different guard interval techniques for the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmission are suggested to reduce the interference between successive symbols (i.e. Inter-Symbol Interference, ISI) and interference between different carriers within the same symbol (i.e. Inter-Carrier Interference, ICI). In this paper, the impact of replacing the Cyclic Prefix (CP) by zeros insertion (ZI) before the Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) process on OFDM is studied. Associated with each OFDM symbol, the zeros will be added in the transmitter before the IFFT process. For symmetry of the OFDM symbol, the zeros will be inserted with the same length among the OFDM frames. The ZI acts as a buffer region where delayed information from the previous symbols can get stored. The receiver has to exclude samples from the ZI which got corrupted by the previous symbol when choosing the samples for an OFDM …

Despite their high stability and compactness, chord-length shape features have received relatively little attention in the human action recognition literature. In this paper, we present a new approach for human activity recognition, based on chord-length shape features. The most interesting contribution of this paper is twofold. We first show how a compact, computationally efficient shape descriptor; the chord-length shape features are constructed using 1-D chord-length functions. Second, we unfold how to use fuzzy membership functions to partition action snippets into a number of temporal states. On two benchmark action datasets (KTH and WEIZMANN), the approach yields promising results that compare favorably with those previously reported in the literature, while maintaining real-time performance.

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A modified Orthogonal Frequency Division MuItiplexing (OFDM) system for robust progressive image transmission is proposed in this paper. A joint sOUfce-channel coder (JSC C ) is employed in the modified OFDM system. The set partitioning hierarchical trees (SPTHT) used as SOUfce code, and The Low-Density Parity-C heck (LDPC ) used as a channel coder. The SPTHT coder is modified to generate fOUf different groups of bit stream relative to its significances. An unequal error protection (UEP) is suggested for data groups with the LDPC coder. Also, the modified OFDM system includes an adaptive c1ipping technique as a Peak to average power ratio (PAPR) reduction technique for OFDM signal. This proposed PAPR reduction technique is based on adaptive c1ipping for the amplitude of the input signal, where each of signals related to the different fOUf groups of the modified SPTHT coder is c1ipped with a …

We introduce an optimal approach to colour image compression using a new scan method. We propose efficient methods to increase the compression ratio for colour images by dividing the colour image into non-overlapping blocks and applying a different compression ratio for these blocks depending on the classification of blocks into edge and non-edge blocks. In an edge block (a region that contains important information) the compression ratio is reduced to prevent loss of information, while in a non-edge block (a smooth region which does not have important information), a high compression ratio is used. The new proposed scan is used instead of the zigzag scan. A particular implementation of this approach was tested, and its performance was quantified using the peak signal-to-noise ratio. Numerical results indicated general improvements in visual quality for colour image coding.

In the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems, where the data symbols are transmitted in parallel on different carriers, the length of a symbol is extended. This extension of the symbol length causes the OFDM system to be less sensitive to channel dispersion than a single carrier system transmitting data symbols at the same data rate. However, at the edges of the OFDM symbol, the channel dispersion still causes distortion, and hence introduces interference between successive symbols (ie Inter-Symbol Interference, ISI) and interference between different carriers within the same symbol (ie Inter-Carrier Interference, ICI). Different guard interval techniques for the OFDM transmission were suggested to reduce the interference between successive symbols. The most commonly used guard interval is the cyclic prefix (CP). In this paper, the impact of replacing the CP by zero insertion (ZI) before the Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) process on the OFDM transmitter is studied. The motivation of using the ZI instead of the CP is the reduction in the transmission rate and the high performance in reducing the channel distortion. Moreover, the proposed ZI-OFDM system is suitable to minimize the effect of the fading channel when the channel characteristics are unknown or difficult to be estimated. Another approach to enhance the OFDM system is also introduced in this paper. A signal denoising approach is suggested to be added in the receiver to reduce the effect of the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. In this approach, the Radio Frequency signal (RF) is enhanced using a wavelet thresholding technique instead of …