Screen content images typically contain a mix of natural and synthetic image parts. Synthetic sections usually are comprised of uniformly colored areas and repeating colors and patterns. In the VVC standard, these properties are exploited using Intra Block Copy and Palette Mode. In this paper, we show that pixel-wise lossless coding can outperform lossy VVC coding in such areas. We propose an enhanced VVC coding approach for screen content images using the principle of soft context formation. First, the image is separated into two layers in a block-wise manner using a learning-based method with four block features. Synthetic image parts are coded losslessly using soft context formation, the rest with VVC. We modify the available soft context formation coder to incorporate information gained by the decoded VVC layer for improved coding efficiency. Using this approach, we achieve Bjontegaard-Delta-rate gains of 4.98% on the evaluated data sets compared to VVC.

Soft context formation is a lossless image coding method for screen content. It encodes images pixel by pixel via arithmetic coding by collecting statistics for probability distribution estimation. Its main pipeline includes three stages, namely a context model based stage, a color palette stage and a residual coding stage. Each stage is only employed if the previous stage is impossible since necessary statistics, e.g. colors or contexts, have not been learned yet. We propose the following enhancements: First, information from previous stages is used to remove redundant palette entries and prediction errors in subsequent stages. Additionally, implicitly known stage decision signals are no longer explicitly transmitted. These enhancements lead to an average bit rate decrease of 1.16% on the evaluated data. Compared to FLIF and HEVC, the proposed method needs roughly 0.28 and 0.17 bits per pixel less on average for 24-bit screen content images, respectively.

The abbreviation rANS stands for a relatively new method of arithmetic coding based on asymmetric numeral systems (ANS) which combines the advantages of arithmetic coding in terms of performance and the advantages of Huffman coding in terms of speed.
Compared to conventional arithmetic coding methods, the mathematical apparatus is slightly different which has the consequence that the decoding order is reversed to the encoding order, i.e. the processing follows the last-in-first-out principle.
This makes it somewhat difficult to design the coding process to adapt to changing symbol statistics, and therefore rANS coding has so far only been applied in settings with fixed statistics.
In particular, the frequent rescaling of statistics required to reduce the influence of old symbols becomes a problem when the order of processing is different on the encoder and decoder sides.

This paper proposes a new method that allows adaptive coding within the framework of rANS coding and additionally offers the possibility of rescaling the symbols frequencies. Investigations show that this method enables the same compression performance for rANS as for conventional arithmetic coding.

In recent years, it has been found that screen content images (SCI) can be effectively compressed based on appropriate probability modelling and suitable entropy coding methods such as arithmetic coding. The key objective is determining the best probability distribution for each pixel position. This strategy works particularly well for images with synthetic (textual) content. However, usually screen content images not only consist of synthetic but also pictorial (natural) regions. These images require diverse models of probability distributions to be optimally compressed. One way to achieve this goal is to separate synthetic and natural regions. This paper proposes a segmentation method that identifies natural regions enabling better adaptive treatment. It supplements a compression method known as Soft Context Formation (SCF) and operates as a pre-processing step. If at least one natural segment is found within the SCI, it is split into two subimages (natural and synthetic parts) and the process of modelling and coding is performed separately for both. For SCIs with natural regions, the proposed method achieves a bit-rate reduction of up to 11.6% and 1.52% with respect to HEVC and the previous version of the SCF.

This paper investigates the systematic and complete usage of k-opt permutations with
k = 2 . . . 6 in application to local optimization of symmetric two-dimensional instances up to
10⁷ points. The proposed method utilizes several techniques for accelerating the processing, such that
good tours can be achieved in limited time: candidates selection based on Delaunay triangulation,
precomputation of a sparse distance matrix, two-level data structure, and parallel processing based
on multithreading. The proposed approach finds good tours (excess of 0.72–8.68% over best-known
tour) in a single run within 30 min for instances with more than 10⁵ points and specifically 3.37% for
the largest examined tour containing 10⁷ points. The new method proves to be competitive with a
state-of-the-art approach based on the Lin–Kernigham–Helsgaun method (LKH) when applied to
clustered instances.

Probability distribution modeling is the basis for most competitive methods for lossless coding of screen content. One such state-of-the-art method is known as soft context formation (SCF). For each pixel to be encoded, a probability distribution is estimated based on the neighboring pattern and the occurrence of that pattern in the already encoded image. Using an arithmetic coder, the pixel color can thus be encoded very efficiently, provided that the current color has been observed before in association with a similar pattern. If this is not the case, the color is instead encoded using a color palette or, if it is still unknown, via residual coding. Both palette-based coding and residual coding have significantly worse compression efficiency than coding based on soft context formation. In this paper, the residual coding stage is improved by adaptively trimming the probability distributions for the residual error. Furthermore, an enhanced probability modeling for indicating a new color depending on the occurrence of new colors in the neighborhood is proposed. These modifications result in a bitrate reduction of up to 2.9% on average. Compared to HEVC (HM-16.21 + SCM-8.8) and FLIF, the improved SCF method saves on average about 11% and 18% rate, respectively.

Distance transformation is an image processing technique used for many different
applications. Related to a binary image, the general idea is to determine the distance of
all background points to the nearest object point (or vice versa). In this tutorial, different
approaches are explained in detail and compared using examples. Corresponding source
code is provided to facilitate own investigations. A particular objective of this tutorial
is to clarify the difference between arbitrary distance transforms and exact Euclidean
distance transformations.

Finding the shortest tour visiting all given points at least ones belongs to the most famous optimization problems until today (TSP . . . travelling salesman problem). Optimal solutions exist for many problems up to several ten thousand points. The major difficulty in solving larger problems is the required computational complexity. This shifts the research from finding the optimum with no time limitation to approaches that find good but sub-optimal solutions in pre-defined limited time. This paper proposes a new approach for two-dimensional symmetric problems with more than a million coordinates that is able to create good initial tours within few minutes. It is based on a hierarchical clustering strategy and supports parallel processing. In addition, a method is proposed that can correct unfavourable paths with moderate computational complexity. The new approach is superior to state-of-the-art methods when applied to TSP instances with non-uniformly distributed coordinates.

Advanced object detectors based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) offer high detection rates for many application scenarios but only within their respective training, validation and test data. Recent studies show that such methods provide a limited generalization ability for unknown data, even for small image modifications including a limited scale invariance. Reliable person detection with aerial robots (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAVs) is an essential task to fulfill high security requirements or to support robot control, communication, and human-robot interaction. Particularly in an agricultural context persons need to be detected from a long distance and a high altitude to allow the UAV an adequate and timely response. While UAVs are able to produce high resolution images that enable the detection of persons from a longer distance, typical CNN input layer sizes are comparably low. The inevitable scaling of images to match the input-layer size can lead to a further reduction in person sizes. We investigate the reliability of different YOLOv3 architectures for person detection in regard to those input-scaling effects. The popular VisDrone data set with its varying image resolutions and relatively small depiction of humans is used as well as high resolution UAV images from an agricultural data set. To overcome the scaling problem, an algorithm is presented for segmenting high resolution images in overlapping tiles that match the input-layer size. The number and overlap of the tiles are dynamically determined based on the image resolution. It is shown that the detection rate of very small persons in high resolution images can be improved using this tiling approach.

The compression of screen content has attracted the interest of researchers in the last years as the market for transferring data from computer displays is growing. It has already been shown that especially those methods can effectively compress screen contentwhich are able to predict the probability distribution of next pixel values. This prediction is typically based on a kind of learning process. The predictor learns the relationship between probable pixel colours and surrounding texture. Recently, an effective method called ‘soft context formation’ (SCF) had been proposed which achieves much lower bitrates for images with less than 8 000 colours than other state-of-the-art compression schemes.
This paper presents an enhanced version of SCF. The average lossless compression performance has increased by about 5% in
application to images with less than 8 000 colours and about 10% for imageswith up to 90 000 colours. In comparison to FLIF, FP8v3, andHEVC(HM−16.20+SCM−8.8), it achieves savings of about 33%, 4%, and 11% on average. The improvements compared to
the original version result from various modifications. The largest contribution is achieved by the local estimation of the probability
distribution for unpredictable colours in stage II of the compression scheme.