Extending the color gamut and dynamic range of an sRGB image using a residual image

Image sources, such as digital camera captures and photographic negatives, typically have more information than can be reproduced on a photographic print or a video display. The information that is lost during the tone/color rendering process relates to both the extended dynamic range and color gamut of the original scene. In conventional photographic systems, most of this additional information is archived on the photographic negative and can be accessed by adjusting the way the negative is printed. However, most digital imaging systems have traditionally archived only a rendered video RGB image. As a result, it is not possible to make the same sorts of image manipulations that historically have been possible with conventional photographic systems. This suggests that there would be an advantage to storing images using an extended dynamic range/color gamut color encoding. However, because of file compatibility issues, digital imaging systems that store images using color encoding other than a standard video RGB representation (e.g., sRGB) would be significantly disadvantaged in the marketplace. In this article, we describe a solution that has been developed to maintain compatibility with existing file formats and software applications, while simultaneously retaining the extended dynamic range and color gamut information associated with the original scenes. With this approach, the input raw digital camera image or film scan is first transformed to the scene‐referred ERIMM RGB color encoding. Next, a rendered sRGB image is formed in the usual way and stored in a conventional image file (e.g., a standard JPEG file). A residual image representing the difference between the original extended dynamic range image and the final rendered image is formed and stored in the image file using proprietary metadata tags. This provides a mechanism for archiving the extended dynamic range/color gamut information, which is normally discarded during the rendering process, without sacrificing interoperability. Appropriately enabled applications can decode the residual image metadata and use it to reconstruct the ERIMM RGB image, whereas applications that are not aware of the metadata will ignore it and only have access to the sRGB image. The residual image is formed such that it will have negligible pixel values for those portions of the image that lie within the sRGB gamut, and will therefore be highly compressible. Tests on a population of 950 real customer images have demonstrated that the extended dynamic range scene information can be stored with an average file size overhead of about 8% compared to the sRGB images alone. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 28, 251–266, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.10160     

Object-oriented query language access to relational databases: A semantic framework for query translation

This research investigates and approach to query processing in a multidatabase system that uses an objectoriented model to capture the semantics of other data models. The object-oriented model is used to construct a global schema, defining an integrated view of the different schemas in the environment. The model is also used as a self-describing model to build a meta-database for storing information about the global schema. A unique aspect of this work is that the object-oriented model is used to describe the different data models of the multidatabase environment, thereby extending the meta database with semantic information about the local schemas. With the global and local schemas all represented in an object-oriented form, structural mappings between the global schema and each local schema are then easily supported. An object algebra then provides a query language for expressing global queries, using the structural mappings to translate object algebra queries into SQL queries over local relational schema. The advantage of using an object algebra is that the object-oriented database can be viewed as a blackboard for temporary storage of local data and for establishing relationships between different databases. The object algebra can be used to directly retrieve temporarily-stored data from the object-oriented database or to transparently retrieve data from local sources using the translation process described in this paper.     

Teaching-Material Design Center: An ontology-based system for customizing reusable e-materials

Use of electronic teaching materials (e-material) to support teaching is a trend. e-Material design is therefore an important issue. Currently, most e-material providers offer a package of solutions for different purposes. However, not all teachers and learners need everything from a single package. A preferable alternative is to find useful material from different packages and combine them for a particular course. Currently, most educators collect the material manually, which is time-consuming and may result in missed material. In this paper, we describe a system – the Teaching-Material Design Center, which follows the standard of Sharable Content Object Reference Model – to separate e-material for use as teaching templates and learning objects and to label the material with use of semantic metadata for searching. This system can find existing teaching templates and learning objects for e-material designers and provide a convenient environment for constructing customized e-material for different requirements. We describe the implementation and evaluation of the proposed system for a course. Our system is efficient in finding teaching templates and learning objects and shortening the e-material development process.     

CONTEXTUALIZING LEARNING OBJECTS USING ONTOLOGIES

Educational research over the past three years has intensified such that the context of learning resources needs to be properly modeled. Many researchers have described and even mandated the use of ontologies in the research being conducted, yet the process of actually connecting one or more ontologies to a learning object has not been extensively discussed. This paper describes a practical model for associating multiple ontologies with learning objects while making full use of the IEEE LOM specification. The model categorizes these ontologies according to five major categories of context based on the most popular fields of study actively being pursued by the educational research community: Thematic context, Pedagogical context, Learner context, Organizational context, and Historical/Statistical context.     

空间数据库中栅格元数据管理模型的设计与实现

分析了栅格元数据基于文件、关系表和XML的3种存储管理方式,比较它们的优缺点,得出了XML适合描述空间数据库中栅格元数据的层次性、复杂性和面向对象性,并具有可扩展性。在BeyonDB中设计和实现了基于XML的栅格元数据管理模型,并以地球系统科学数据共享平台中DEM数据集为例验证该模型的可扩展性,为空间数据库中海量遥感影像数据的管理研究提供参考。     

基于模板的．Net三层架构的代码自动生成

三层架构是数据库开发中最常用的分层架构。三层结构能够提高代码重用率,降低项目开发难度。为了解决手工编写三层架构的代码工作量大且容易出错的问题,使用．Net平台提供的动态编译和反射技术,设计并实现了基于可定制模板的自动代码生成器。该代码生成器利用三层架构的代码依赖数据库的架构信息这一特点,以数据库架构信息、Xml配置文件和模板文件作为输入,输出三层架构的各层代码。用户可以修改Xml配置文件的内容和使用该代码生成器提供的模板语言定制、修改自己的模板文件,方便、灵活地控制输出的目标代码。代码生成器的使用在实际的项目开发中具有重要的意义。     

基于本体的主动元数据挖掘系统研究

传统网上信息检索是用户被动地依靠浏览超级链接网页而获取的。文中提出基于本体的主动元数据挖掘系统以及在果品领域的应用,在主动搜索、元数据生成、借助本体作用于数据的语义描述等方面,其效果是客观的。使得对信息数据的搜索从被动地获取到主动依靠计算机自动搜索;从依靠关键字作为查询依据到借助本体的作用获取语义描述的信息数据,进而提高了信息查询效率及查询的准确率,这也是当前信息检索研究的热门课题。实验证明,通过主动元数据挖掘实例可以实现语义的扩充,如同义、近义及上下位关系。同时也验证了本体对实施语义智能检索所带来的客观效果。     

磁盘阵列环境下的取证目标系统重构

封存原始硬盘与业务系统服务的连续性是计算机取证中面临的一对矛盾。在独立硬盘环境中,问题的解决并不困难,但在磁盘阵列(RAID)环境下,目前还缺乏有效的解决办法。为此,为RAID环境下的取证目标系统的重构提出一套解决方案,并设计实现其中关键任务的处理软件。实验表明,该方法可适用于不同RAID等级、不同操作系统下的系统重构,使得用户感受不到重构得到的系统与原系统有任何差异。与数据同步方法相比,该方法可以有效地减少重构的时间开销,且不会破坏原始证据硬盘上的数据。     

云计算环境中高效可扩展的元数据管理方法

针对现有元数据管理方法存在可扩展性差或访问效率低的问题,提出一种高效可扩展的元数据管理方法.基于可扩展哈希方法实现元数据系统动态可扩展,使用并行定位方法实现元数据服务器高效定位,提出动态K叉树的元数据组织方法以提高元数据服务器扩展时选择迁移元数据的速度.实验结果表明,该方法具有近似线性扩展性能,其选择迁移元数据的时间几乎为零,有效解决了云计算环境中元数据管理系统的高效动态可扩展问题.     

Jump Filter: A Dynamic Sketch for Big Data Governance

With the rapid development of information technology, the volume of data maintains exponential growth, and the value of data is hard to mine. This brings significant challenges to the efficient management and control of each link in the data life cycle, such as data collection, cleaning, storage, and sharing. Sketch uses a hash table/matrix/bit vector to track the core characteristics of data, such as frequency, cardinality, and membership. This mechanism makes the sketch itself metadata, which has been widely used in sharing, transmission, update, and other scenarios. The rapid flow characteristic of big data has spawned dynamic sketches. The existing dynamic sketches have the advantage of expanding or shrinking the capacity with the size of the data stream by dynamically maintaining a list of probabilistic data structures in a chain or tree structure. However, there are problems with the excessive space overhead and time overhead increasing with the increase in the dataset cardinality. This paper designs a dynamic sketch for big data governance on the basis of the advanced jump consistent hash. This method can simultaneously achieve the space overhead that grows linearly with the dataset cardinality and the constant time overhead of data processing and analysis, effectively supporting the demanding big data processing and analysis tasks for big data governance. The validity and efficiency of the proposed method are verified by the comparison with traditional methods on various synthetic and natural datasets.