Choice of a pertinent color space for color texture characterization using parametric spectral analysis

This article presents a comparison of different color spaces including RGB, IHLS and L?a*b* for color texture characterization. This comparison is based on the fusion of the independent spatial structure and color feature cues. In IHLS and L*a*b*, two channel complex color images are created from the luminance and the chrominance values. For such images, two dimensional complex multichannel linear prediction models are used to perform parametric power spectrum estimation and the structure feature cues are computed from this estimated power spectrum. Quantitative comparison of auto spectra of luminance and combined chrominance channels for different color spaces is done. This comparison is based on the degree of decorrelation between luminance and chrominance information provided by different color space transformations. Three dimensional histograms are used as color feature cues. Then, to classify color textures, Kullback-Leibler divergence based symmetric distance measures are calculated for pure color, luminance structure and chrominance structure feature cues. Individual as well as combined effect of information from all feature cues on classification results is then compared for different color spaces and different color texture data sets. The proposed color texture classification method performs better than the state of the art methods in certain cases. The L*a*b* color space gives us a better characterization of the chrominance spatial structure as well as the overall spatial structure for all of the chosen data sets. Experimental results on pixel classification of color textures are also presented and discussed.     

A fast parallel (23, 12, 7) QR decoder based on syndrome-weight determination

In this paper, a time-area efficient hardware decoder of the (23, 12, 7) quadratic residue code, or Golay code, is presented. The key feature of this proposed algorithm lies in fast determination of error positions through the analysis on the weight of syndromes without large operations in finite fields. Comparing with the algorithm using one syndrome, the proposed algorithm is more suitable for the parallel hardware design by using two syndromes. Based on an Altera Cyclone II field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device (EP2C35F484C6), the area cost and the time delay of the complete system are reduced by up to 86.4% and 22.5%, respectively. Using the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 0.18-μm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) standard cell library, the proposed decoder is 91.8% smaller and 8.3% faster.     

Additive noise removal using a novel fuzzy-based filter

The paper proposes a new fuzzy-based two-step filter for restoring images corrupted with additive noise. The goal of the first step is to compute the difference between the central pixel and its neighborhood in a selected window and to compute a fuzzy membership degree for each difference value using a Gaussian membership function. Computed fuzzy membership values are appropriately utilized as weights for each pixel and then computes the weighted average representing the modified value for the current central pixel. The second step is used as an augmented step to the first one and its goal is to improve the result obtained in the first step by reducing the noise in the color component differences without destroying the fine details of the image. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed method gives better results compared to existing advanced filters for additive noise reduction. Both visual, quantitative and qualitative analysis have been done to prove the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.