Yixin Du

Zhijun Lei, Vibhoothi Vibhoothi, Dzung Hoang et al.

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) has developed the AV2 video coding standard to supersede AV1, aiming for substantial compression efficiency gains across diverse media applications. This paper details the quality and performance evaluation methodology defined in the AV2 Common Test Conditions (CTC), which introduces new evaluation methods and content, including convex-hull-based adaptive streaming (AS) configuration, user-generated content (UGC), and extended chroma formats. We present the coding gains of the AV2 (v13.0) against the AV1 baseline. Experimental results show that AV2 achieves significant Bjøntegaard-Delta Rate (BD-rate) reductions of 29.81\% and 33.79\% for PSNR-YUV and VMAF, respectively, under random access configuration, validating the efficiency of AV2 for next-generation streaming applications.

Xin Zhao, Liang Zhao, Madhu Krishnan et al.

The Alliance for Open Media has recently initiated coding tool exploration activities towards the next-generation video coding beyond AV1. With this regard, this paper presents a package of coding tools that have been investigated, implemented and tested on top of the codebase, known as libaom, which is used for the exploration of next-generation video compression tools. The proposed tools cover several technical areas based on a traditional hybrid video coding structure, including block partitioning, prediction, transform and loop filtering. The proposed coding tools are integrated as a package, and a combined coding gain over AV1 is demonstrated in this paper. Furthermore, to better understand the behavior of each tool, besides the combined coding gain, the tool-on and tool-off tests are also simulated and reported for each individual coding tool. Experimental results show that, compared to libaom, the proposed methods achieve an average 8.0% (up to 22.0%) overall BD-rate reduction for All Intra coding configuration a wide range of image and video content.

Jared Strader, Jennifer Nguyen, Christopher Tatsch et al.

Robotic pollinators not only can aid farmers by providing more cost effective and stable methods for pollinating plants but also benefit crop production in environments not suitable for bees such as greenhouses, growth chambers, and in outer space. Robotic pollination requires a high degree of precision and autonomy but few systems have addressed both of these aspects in practice. In this paper, a fully autonomous robot is presented, capable of precise pollination of individual small flowers. Experimental results show that the proposed system is able to achieve a 93.1% detection accuracy and a 76.9% 'pollination' success rate tested with high-fidelity artificial flowers.

Nicholas Ohi, Kyle Lassak, Ryan Watson et al.

Precision robotic pollination systems can not only fill the gap of declining natural pollinators, but can also surpass them in efficiency and uniformity, helping to feed the fast-growing human population on Earth. This paper presents the design and ongoing development of an autonomous robot named "BrambleBee", which aims at pollinating bramble plants in a greenhouse environment. Partially inspired by the ecology and behavior of bees, BrambleBee employs state-of-the-art localization and mapping, visual perception, path planning, motion control, and manipulation techniques to create an efficient and robust autonomous pollination system.

Yixin Du, Xin Li

Existing approaches towards single image dehazing including both model-based and learning-based heavily rely on the estimation of so-called transmission maps. Despite its conceptual simplicity, using transmission maps as an intermediate step often makes it more difficult to optimize the perceptual quality of reconstructed images. To overcome this weakness, we propose a direct deep learning approach toward image dehazing bypassing the step of transmission map estimation and facilitating end-to-end perceptual optimization. Our technical contributions are mainly three-fold. First, based on the analogy between dehazing and denoising, we propose to directly learn a nonlinear mapping from the space of degraded images to that of haze-free ones via recursive deep residual learning; Second, inspired by the success of generative adversarial networks (GAN), we propose to optimize the perceptual quality of dehazed images by introducing a discriminator and a loss function adaptive to hazy conditions; Third, we propose to remove notorious halo-like artifacts at large scene depth discontinuities by a novel application of guided filtering. Extensive experimental results have shown that the subjective qualities of dehazed images by the proposed perceptually optimized GAN (POGAN) are often more favorable than those by existing state-of-the-art approaches especially when hazy condition varies.