Dans cette thèse, nous explorons premièrement la notion de directionnalité lors de la conception de repères d'ondelettes du plan. Cette propriété, qui semble essentielle pour la vision biologique, donne lieu à une meilleure représentation des contours d'ob jets dans les décompositions d'images utilisant ces repères. Elle génère en outre une redondance supplémentaire qui, exploitée à bon escient, permet par exemple de réduire les effets d'un bruit additif (gaussien). Nous montrons également comment cette directionnalité, généralement perçue comme un paramètre figé, peut être adaptée localement aux éléments d'une image. Nous définissons ainsi le concept d'analyse d'images multisélective. Dans ce cadre, des règles de récurrence héritées d'une analyse multirésolution circulaire associent des ondelettes d'une certaine sélectivité angulaire pour générer des ondelettes de plus faible directionnalité jusqu'à l'obtention d'une ondelette totalement isotrope. Dans le cas d'un repère d'ondelettes linéaire, ces différents niveaux de ...

Les récentes évolutions des technologies de l'information et de la communication font qu'il est aujourd'hui facile de consulter des catalogues de morceaux de musique conséquents. De nouvelles représentations et de nouveaux algorithmes doivent de ce fait être développés afin de disposer d'une vision représentative de ces catalogues et de naviguer avec agilité dans leurs contenus. Ceci nécessite une caractérisation efficace des morceaux de musique par l'intermédiaire de descriptions macroscopiques pertinentes. Dans cette thèse, nous nous focalisons sur l'estimation de la structure des morceaux de musique : il s'agit de produire pour chaque morceau une description de son organisation par une séquence de quelques dizaines de segments structurels, définis par leurs frontières (un instant de début et un instant de fin) et par une étiquette représentant leur contenu sonore.La notion de structure musicale peut correspondre à de multiples acceptions selon les ...

In French. See thesis pdf.

Matrices, as natural representation of linear mappings in finite dimension, play a crucial role in signal processing and machine learning. Multiplying a vector by a full rank matrix a priori costs of the order of the number of non-zero entries in the matrix, in terms of arithmetic operations. However, matrices exist that can be applied much faster, this property being crucial to the success of certain linear transformations, such as the Fourier transform or the wavelet transform. What is the property that allows these matrices to be applied rapidly ? Is it easy to verify ? Can weapproximate matrices with ones having this property ? Can we estimate matrices having this property ? This thesis investigates these questions, exploring applications such as learning dictionaries with efficient implementations, accelerating the resolution of inverse problems or Fast Fourier Transform on graphs.

This work deals with the use of an antenna array at the base station of a mobile communication system for transmission. In reception, solutions that exploit the antenna array are now well established. In transmission, however, the problem remains open. Two approaches are possible : exploit the array by using beamforming techniques or by using diversity techniques. These two approaches are based on opposite assumptions about the channels correlation, which implies a greater or smaller distance between antennas, depending on the environment. In practice, these assumptions are not verified. Here, we aim to deal with the problem as a whole for better exploiting the antenna array. This work treats the mono-user case, as well as the multi-user scenario. In the mono-user case, we propose a transmission scheme composed of a classical transmit diversity technique applied to virtual antennas, which are ...

The goal of this work is to propose a general approach for surveillance video indexing and retrieval. Based on the hypothesis that videos are preprocessed by an external video analysis module, this approach is composed of two phases : indexing phase and retrieval phase. In order to profit from the output of various video analysis modules, a general data model consisting of two main concepts, objects and events, is proposed. The indexing phase that aims at preparing data defined in the data model performs three tasks. Firstly, two new key blob detection methods in the object representation task choose for each detected object a set of key blobs associated with a weight. Secondly, the feature extraction task analyzes a number of visual and temporal features on detected objects. Finally, the indexing task computes attributes of the two concepts and stores ...

In scalable image/video coding, high resolution content is encoded to the highest visual quality and the bit-streams are adapted to cater various communication channels, display devices and usage requirements. These content adaptations, which include quality, resolution and frame rate scaling may also affect the content protection data, such as, watermarks and are considered as a potential watermark attack. In this thesis, research on robust watermarking techniques for scalable coded image and video, are proposed and the improvements in robustness against various content adaptation attacks, such as, JPEG 2000 for image and Motion JPEG 2000, MC-EZBC and H.264/SVC for video, are reported. The spread spectrum domain, particularly wavelet-based image watermarking schemes often provides better robustness to compression attacks due to its multi-resolution decomposition and hence chosen for this work. A comprehensive and comparative analysis of the available wavelet-based watermarking schemes,is performed ...

The work presented in this thesis covers topics that extend the scalability functionalities in video coding and improve the compression performance. Two main novel approaches are presented, each targeting a different part of the scalable video coding (SVC) architecture: motion adaptive wavelet transform based on the wavelet transform in lifting implementation, and a design of a flexible framework for generalised spatio-temporal decomposition. Motion adaptive wavelet transform is based on the newly introduced concept of connectivity-map. The connectivity-map describes the underlying irregular structure of regularly sampled data. To enable a scalable representation of the connectivity-map, the corresponding analysis and synthesis operations have been derived. These are then employed to define a joint wavelet connectivity-map decomposition that serves as an adaptive alternative to the conventional wavelet decomposition. To demonstrate its applicability, the presented decomposition scheme is used in the proposed SVC framework, ...

This thesis interests in different methods of image compression combining both Bayesian aspects and ``sparse decomposition'' aspects. Two compression methods are in particular investigated. Transform coding, first, is addressed from a transform optimization point of view. The optimization is considered at two levels: in the spatial domain by adapting the support of the transform, and in the transform domain by selecting local bases among finite sets. The study of bases learned with an algorithm from the literature constitutes an introduction to a novel learning algorithm, which encourages the sparsity of the decompositions. Predictive coding is then addressed. Motivated by recent contributions based on sparse decompositions, we propose a novel Bayesian prediction algorithm based on mixtures of sparse decompositions. Finally, these works allowed to underline the interest of structuring the sparsity of the decompositions. For example, a weighting of the decomposition ...

An intelligent antenna is actually composed of a series of elementary antennas (linear, circular, etc.) who’s received signals are balanced and combined by using a technique of adaptation in order to control and improve the reception or the transmission. The objective of our study is to look further into the knowledge of the methods of formation of the beams and to elaborate a digital technique of synthesis for the formation of ways and the cancellation of interfering which answers the specifications imposed by the system adaptive by using the networks of neurons. The work of thesis consisted of a contribution to the optimization of the lobe of radiation for an intelligent antenna. In a first stage, two complementary approaches were developed to implement the technique of forming of the lobe, one based on an algorithm of optimization which calculates the ...

This thesis describes a visualization pipeline for sonar profiling data that show reflections of multiple sediments in the sea bottom and that cover huge survey areas with many gaps. Visualizing such data is not trivial, because they may be noisy and because data sets may be very large. The developed techniques are: (1) Quadtree interpolation for estimating new sediment reflections, at all gaps in the longitude-latitude plane. The quadtree is used for guiding the 3D interpolation process: gaps become small at low spatial resolutions, where they can be filled by interpolating between available reflections. In the interpolation, the reflection data are cross correlated in order to construct continuity of multiple, sloping reflections. (2) Segmentation and boundary refinement in an octree in order to detect sediments in the sonar data. In the refinement, coarse boundaries are reclassified by filtering the data ...

Video signals are sequences of natural images, where images are often modeled as piecewise-smooth signals. Hence, video can be seen as a 3D piecewise-smooth signal made of piecewise-smooth regions that move through time. Based on the piecewise-smooth model and on related theoretical work on rate-distortion performance of wavelet and oracle based coding schemes, one can better analyze the appropriate coding strategies that adaptive video codecs need to implement in order to be efficient. Efficient video representations for coding purposes require the use of adaptive signal decompositions able to capture appropriately the structure and redundancy appearing in video signals. Adaptivity needs to be such that it allows for proper modeling of signals in order to represent these with the lowest possible coding cost. Video is a very structured signal with high geometric content. This includes temporal geometry (normally represented by motion ...

High compression ratio, scalability and reliability are the main issues for transmitting multimedia content over best effort networks. Scalable image and video coding meets the user requirements by truncating the scalable bitstream at different quality, resolution and frame rate. However, the performance of scalable coding deteriorates rapidly over packet networks if the base layer packets are lost during transmission. Multiple description coding (MDC) has emerged as an effective source coding technique for robust image and video transmission over lossy networks. In this research problem of incorporating scalability in MDC for robust image and video transmission over best effort network is addressed. The first contribution of this thesis is to propose a strategy for generating more than two descriptions using multiple description scalar quantizer (MDSQ) with an objective to jointly decoded any number of descriptions in balanced and unbalanced manner. The ...

Retrieval of images that lack a (suitable) annotations cannot be achieved through (traditional) Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. Access through such collections can be achieved through the application of computer vision techniques on the IR problem, which is baptized Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). In contrast with most purely technological approaches, the thesis Human-Centered Content-Based Image Retrieval approaches the problem from a human/user centered perspective. Psychophysical experiments were conducted in which people were asked to categorize colors. The data gathered from these experiments was fed to a Fast Exact Euclidean Distance (FEED) transform (Schouten & Van den Broek, 2004), which enabled the segmentation of color space based on human perception (Van den Broek et al., 2008). This unique color space segementation was exploited for texture analysis and image segmentation, and subsequently for full-featured CBIR. In addition, a unique CBIR-benchmark was developed (Van ...

Scalable representation of a source (e.g., image/video/3D mesh) enables decoding of the encoded bit-stream on a variety of end-user terminals with varying display, storage and processing capabilities. Furthermore, it allows for source communication via channels with different transmission bandwidths, as the source rate can be easily adapted to match the available channel bandwidth. From a different perspective, error-resilience against channel losses is also very important when transmitting scalable source streams over lossy transmission channels. Driven by the aforementioned requirements of scalable representation and error-resilience, this dissertation focuses on the analysis and design of scalable single and multiple description scalar quantizers. In the first part of this dissertation, we consider the design of scalable wavelet-based semi-regular 3D mesh compression systems. In this context, our design methodology thoroughly analyzes different modules of the mesh coding system in order to single-out appropriate design ...