Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

Efficient processing, i.e., analysis, storage, access and transmission of visual content, with continuously increasing data rates, in environments which are more and more mobile and distributed, remains a key challenge of the signal and image processing community. New imaging modalities (HDR, multiview, plenoptic, light fields, 360^o videos) generating very large volumes of data contribute to the sustained need for efficient algorithms for a variety of processing tasks.

Building upon a strong background on signal/image/video processing and information theory, the goal of the SIROCCO team is to design mathematically founded tools and algorithms for visual data analysis, modeling, representation, coding, and processing, with for the latter area an emphasis on inverse problems related to super-resolution, view synthesis, HDR recovery from multiple exposures, denoising and inpainting. Even if 2D imaging is still within our scope, the goal is to give a particular attention to HDR imaging, light fields, and 360^o videos. The project-team activities are structured and organized around the following inter-dependent research axes:

• Visual data analysis

• Signal processing and learning methods for visual data representation and compression

• Algorithms for inverse problems in visual data processing

• Distributed coding for interactive communication.

While aiming at generic approaches, some of the solutions developed are applied to practical problems in partnership with industry (Technicolor, Ericsson, Orange) or in the framework of national projects. The application domains addressed by the project are networked visual applications taking into account their various requirements and needs in terms of compression, of network adaptation, of advanced functionalities such as navigation, interactive streaming and high quality rendering.