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Forensic examination of digital audio, video, and images frequently requires transforming multimedia data from one format to another. The transformative activity may cause changes to the administrative elements of the file but leave the multimedia streams unchanged and intact. However, the forensic science community has a method knowledge gap in accurately determining if the multimedia streams changed or remained the same in the transformative processes. This paper illustrates the practical use of multimedia stream hashing as a forensic method for verifying multimedia content. A universal stream hashing tool decodes the multimedia stream data at rest in a file container. Subsequently, it calculates the data stream hash using reference video, audio, and image codecs. This paper illustrates that the multimedia stream hashing method can accurately confirm the integrity of digital images, videos, and audio following transmission, transcoding, or re‐containerization. Our findings confirmed that stream hashing could accurately detect changes in multimedia streams during transcoding. Furthermore, the stream hashing method can also accurately detect matching multimedia streams. In addition, this paper verified the forensic use of the multimedia stream hash method while establishing the error rate for its use. The hash algorithms used in stream hashing have zero false negative rates by design. However, the false positive (error rate) is extremely low and depends on hashing algorithm. Finally, we recommend the forensic science community adopt the multimedia stream hashing method as an initial testing method. The method can verify a multimedia stream's conversion (transcoding) from one codec to another using FFmpeg. Highlights: Re‐encoding of multimedia streams must be transparent for forensic examinations.Multimedia stream hashing is a stream integrity verification method used in forensic science.Multimedia stream hashing has an extremely low potential for a false positive (error rate). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is simply the transport of voice traffic over the Internet or any IP-based packet-switched network. This is in contrast with the traditional telephone network, carrying voice data over dedicated circuit-switched transmission lines. A major challenge to implementing VoIP is to ensure sufficient bandwidth, and access to the available bandwidth is controlled and prioritized. Sufficient bandwidth is required to maintain highquality voice. On the other hand, controlling it limits bandwidth-hogging applications and guarantees access to delay-sensitive applications. The objective of this paper is to familiarize the readers with building a test VoIP lab setup using open-source tools; experimenting how different network impairments would affect VoIP quality; and explaining the lab setup activities, investigations, data analysis and research. Subsequently, the paper gives an overview of various technicalities such as operating system, servers, codec selection, signaling protocols, etc. involved in achieving network quality-of-service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, machine learning-based image compression has attracted increasing interests and is approaching the state-of-the-art compression ratio. But unlike traditional codec, it lacks a universal optimization method to seek efficient representation for different images. In this paper, we develop a plug-and-play optimization framework for seeking higher compression ratio, which can be flexibly applied to existing and potential future compression networks. To make the latent representation more efficient, we propose a novel latent optimization algorithm to adaptively remove the redundancy for each image. Additionally, inspired by the potential of side information for traditional codecs, we introduce side information into our framework, and integrate side information optimization with latent optimization to further enhance the compression ratio. In particular, with the joint side information and latent optimization, we can achieve fine rate control using only single model instead of training different models for different rate-distortion trade-offs, which significantly reduces the training and storage cost to support multiple bit rates. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework can remarkably boost the machine learning-based compression ratio, achieving more than 10% additional bit rate saving on three different representative network structures. With the proposed optimization framework, we can achieve 7.6% bit rate saving against the latest traditional coding standard VVC on Kodak dataset, yielding the state-of-the-art compression ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Light field datasets enable researchers to conduct both objective and subjective quality assessments, which are particularly useful when acquisition equipment or resources are not available. Such datasets may vary in terms of capture technology and methodology, content, quality characteristics (e.g., resolution), and the availability of subjective ratings. When contents of a light field dataset are visualized on a light field display, the display system matches the received input to its output capabilities through various processes, such as interpolation. Therefore, one of the most straightforward methods to create light field contents for a specific display is to consider its visualization parameters during acquisition. In this paper, we introduce a novel display-specific light field dataset, captured using a DSLR camera and a turntable rig. The visual data of the seven static scenes were recorded twice by using two settings of angular resolution. While both were acquired uniformly within a 53-degree angle, which matches the viewing cone of the display they were captured for, one dataset consists of 70 views per content, while the other of 140. Capturing the contents twice was a more straightforward solution than downsampling, as the latter approach could either degrade the quality or make the FOV size inaccurate. The paper provides a detailed characterization of the captured contents, as well as compressed variations of the contents with various codecs, together with the calculated values of commonly-used quality metrics for the compressed light field contents. We expect that this dataset will be useful for the research community working on light field compression, processing, and quality assessment, for instance to perform subjective quality assessment tests on a display with a 53-degree display cone and to test new interpolation methods and objective quality metrics. In future work, we will also focus on subjective tests and provide relevant results. This dataset is made free to access for the research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A tunable active-noise-control (ANC) circuit topology for headsets used in different applications is presented in this article. In the current consumer headset market, ANC is a mature technology that is commonly applied to wireless headsets connected to smartphones for listening to music and making phone calls. The development of ANC headsets has resulted in low-cost and simple devices due to the built-in ANC registers in the digital circuit. Digital circuit implementation is important to provide ultra-low latency processing for different algorithms compared with using digital signal processors (DSPs). However, a limitation associated with these built-in ANC filters is that the ANC digital circuit has been designed only for the wireless headset consumer market. Consequently, ANC headsets can only be used for designated features. ANC tuned for planes by eliminating low-frequency engine noise has been commonly used in the past twenty years. Pass-through (PT) amplification is also commonly tuned to allow users to hear external sounds and have conversations without having to remove their headset. In addition, ANC and PT amplification are also not allowed to operate simultaneously on the existing chipsets. In this paper, an ANC circuit topology with ultra-low latency processing is presented, where the ANC response of the headset can be tuned without any restriction imposed by the built-in ANC filters. The proposed ANC circuit topology consists of a commercial ANC chipset with an external audio codec to provide tunable characteristics. It is achieved by fixed maximum noise cancellation of ANC chipset being modified by summing with the signal from audio-codec path via an audio mixer. Acoustic performance for several headset applications implemented using the proposed circuit is validated. This simple circuit topology can be easily developed and adapted to the current headset consumer market for consumer-selective ANC in different environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an evaluation of the latest MPEG-5 Part 2 Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) for video streaming applications using best effort protocols. LCEVC is a new video standard by MPEG, which enhances any base codec through an additional low bitrate stream, improving both video compression efficiency and and transmission. However, there is an interplay between packetization, packet loss visibility, choice of codec and video quality, which implies that prior studies with other codecs may be not as relevant. The contributions of this paper is, therefore in twofold: It evaluates the compression performance of LCEVC and then the impact of packet loss on its video quality when compared to H.264 and HEVC.The results from this evaluation suggest that, regarding compression, LCEVC outperformed its base codecs, overall in terms average encoding bitrate savings when using the constant rate factor (CRF) rate control. For example at a CRF of 19, the average encoding bitrate was reduced by 18.7% and 15.8% when compared with the base H.264 and HEVC codecs respectively. Furthermore, LCEVC produced better visual quality across the packet loss range compared to its base codecs and the quality only started to decrease once packet loss exceeded 0.8-1%, and decreases at a slower pace compared to its equivalent base codecs. This suggests that the LCEVC enhancement layer also provides error concealment. The results presented in this paper will be of interest to those considering the LCEVC standard and expected video quality in error-prone environments [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear codes achieving or nearly achieving the Singleton bound are interesting in both theory and practice. The objective of this paper is to construct several infinite families of MDS, near MDS and almost MDS codes from some special cyclic subgroups of ${\mathbb {F}}_{q^{2}}^{*}$. To this end, the augmentation and extension techniques are used. The codes in this paper have flexible parameters and their lengths could be large. The minimum linear locality of the codes constructed in this paper is also studied. Some infinite families of optimal linearly locally recoverable codes are obtained. Besides, some codes in this paper are proved to be proper for error detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, there has been growing interest in multimedia services, especially in the video domain, where firms and subscribers require higher resolutions, framerates, and sampling precision. This results in a huge amount of data that needs to be processed, stored, and transmitted. As a result, researchers face the challenge of developing new compression standards that can reduce the amount of data while maintaining the same quality. In this paper, the compression performance of the latest and most commonly used video codecs, namely H.266/VVC, AV1, H265/HEVC, and H.264/AVC was examined. The test set included seven sequences of various content at 8K, Ultra HD (UHD), and Full HD (FHD) resolutions, encoded to bitrates ranging from 1 to 15 Mbps for FHD and UHD resolutions and from 5 to 50 Mbps for 8K resolution. Objective quality metrics, such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), the structural similarity index (SSIM), and video multi-method assessment fusion (VMAF) were used to measure codec performance. The results showed that H.266/VVC outperformed all other codecs, namely H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and AV1, in terms of the Bjøntegaard delta (BD) model. The average bitrate savings were approximately 78% for H.266/VVC, 63% for AV1, and 53% for H.265/HEVC relative to H.264/AVC, 59% for H.266/VVC and 22% for AV1 compared to H.264/AVC, and 46% for H.266/VVC relative to AV1 (all for 8K resolution). The results also showed that codec performance varied depending on resolution, with higher resolutions showing greater efficiency for newly developed codecs, such as H.266/VVC and AV1. This confirms the fact that the H.266/VVC and AV1 codecs were primarily developed for videos at high resolutions, such as 8K and/or UHD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is one of the most widely studied coding standards. It still uses the block-based hybrid coding framework of Advanced Video Coding (AVC), and compared to AVC, it can double the compression ratio while maintaining the same quality of reconstructed video. The quantization module is an important module in video coding. In the process of quantization, quantization parameter is an important factor in determining the bitrate in video coding, especially in the case of limited channel bandwidth. It is particularly important to select a reasonable quantization parameter to make the bitrate as close as possible to the target bitrate. Aiming at the problem of unreasonable selection of quantization parameters in codecs, this paper proposes using a differential evolution algorithm to assign quantization parameter values to the coding tree unit (CTU) in each frame of 360-degree panoramic video based on HEVC so as to strike a balance between bitrate and distortion. Firstly, the number of CTU rows in a 360-degree panoramic video frame is considered as the dimension of the optimization problem. Then, a trial vector is obtained by randomly selecting the vectors in the population for mutation and crossover. In the mutation step, the algorithm generates a new parameter vector by adding the weighted difference between two population vectors to a third vector. And the elements in the new parameter vector are selected according to the crossover rate. Finally, the trial vector is regarded as the quantization parameter of each CTU in the CTU row to encode, and the vector with the least rate distortion is selected. The algorithm will produce the optimal quantization parameter combination for the current video. The experimental results show that compared to the benchmark algorithm of HEVC reference software HM-16.20, the proposed algorithm can provide a bit saving of 1.86%, while the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) can be improved by 0.07 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes are a well-studied subclass of cyclic codes that have found numerous applications in error correction and notably in quantum information processing. They are widely used in data storage and communication systems. A subclass of attractive BCH codes is the narrow-sense BCH codes over the Galois field ${\mathrm {GF}}(q)$ with length $q+1$ , which are closely related to the action of the projective general linear group of degree two on the projective line. Despite its interest, not much is known about this class of BCH codes. This paper aims to study some of the codes within this class and specifically narrow-sense antiprimitive BCH codes (these codes are also linear complementary duals (LCD) codes that have interesting practical recent applications in cryptography, among other benefits). We shall use tools and combine arguments from algebraic coding theory, combinatorial designs, and group theory (group actions, representation theory of finite groups, etc.) to investigate narrow-sense antiprimitive BCH Codes and extend results from the recent literature. Notably, the dimension, the minimum distance of some $q$ -ary BCH codes with length $q+1$ , and their duals are determined in this paper. The dual codes of the narrow-sense antiprimitive BCH codes derived in this paper include almost MDS codes. Furthermore, the classification of ${\mathrm {PGL}}(2, p^{m})$ -invariant codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(p^{h})$ is completed. As an application of this result, the $p$ -ranks of all incidence structures invariant under the projective general linear group ${\mathrm {PGL}}(2, p^{m})$ are determined. Furthermore, infinite families of narrow-sense BCH codes admitting a 3-transitive automorphism group are obtained. Via these BCH codes, a coding-theory approach to constructing the Witt spherical geometry designs is presented. The BCH codes proposed in this paper are good candidates for permutation decoding, as they have a relatively large group of automorphisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past several years, we have witnessed impressive progress in the field of learned image compression. Recent learned image codecs are commonly based on autoencoders, that first encode an image into low-dimensional latent representations and then decode them for reconstruction purposes. To capture spatial dependencies in the latent space, prior works exploit hyperprior and spatial context model to build an entropy model, which estimates the bit-rate for end-to-end rate-distortion optimization. However, such an entropy model is suboptimal from two aspects: (1) It fails to capture global-scope spatial correlations among the latents. (2) Cross-channel relationships of the latents remain unexplored. In this paper, we propose the concept of separate entropy coding to leverage a serial decoding process for causal contextual entropy prediction in the latent space. A causal context model is proposed that separates the latents across channels and makes use of channel-wise relationships to generate highly informative adjacent contexts. Furthermore, we propose a causal global prediction model to find global reference points for accurate predictions of undecoded points. Both these two models facilitate entropy estimation without the transmission of overhead. In addition, we further adopt a new group-separated attention module to build more powerful transform networks. Experimental results demonstrate that our full image compression model outperforms standard VVC/H.266 codec on Kodak dataset in terms of both PSNR and MS-SSIM, yielding the state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaming video streaming services have grown tremendously in the past few years, with higher resolutions, higher frame rates and HDR gaming videos getting increasingly adopted among the gaming community. Since gaming content as such is different from non-gaming content, it is imperative to evaluate the performance of the existing encoders to help understand the bandwidth requirements of such services, as well as further improve the compression efficiency of such encoders. Towards this end, we present in this paper GamingHDRVideoSET, a dataset consisting of eighteen 10-bit UHD-HDR gaming videos and encoded video sequences using four different codecs, together with their objective evaluation results. Additionally, the paper discusses the codec compression efficiency of most widely used practical encoders, i.e., x264 (H.264/AVC), x265 (H.265/HEVC) and libvpx (VP9), as well the recently proposed encoder libaom (AV1), on 10-bit, UHD-HDR content gaming content. Our results show that the latest compression standard AV1 results in the best compression efficiency, followed by HEVC, H.264, and VP9. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is dedicated to video coding based on a compressive sensing (CS) framework. In CS, it is assumed that if a video sequence is sparse in some transform domain, then it could be reconstructed from a much lower number of samples (called measurements) than the Nyquist–Shannon theorem requires. Here, the performance of such a codec depends on how the measurements are acquired (or sensed) and compressed and how the video is reconstructed from the decoded measurements. Here, such a codec potentially could provide significantly faster encoding compared with traditional block-based intra-frame encoding via Motion JPEG (MJPEG), H.264/AVC or H.265/HEVC standards. However, existing video codecs based on CS are inferior to the traditional codecs in rate distortion performance, which makes them useless in practical scenarios. In this paper, we present a video codec based on CS called CS-JPEG. To the author's knowledge, CS-JPEG is the first codec based on CS, combining fast encoding and high rate distortion results. Our performance evaluation shows that, compared with the optimized software implementations of MJPEG, H.264/AVC, and H.265/HEVC, the proposed CS-JPEG encoding is 2.2, 1.9, and 30.5 times faster, providing 2.33, 0.79, and 1.45 dB improvements in the peak signal-to-noise ratio, respectively. Therefore, it could be more attractive for video applications having critical limitations in computational resources or a battery lifetime of an upstreaming device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity are important cryptographic primitives in some stream ciphers. In this paper, two methodologies for constructing minimal binary codes from sets, Boolean functions and vectorial Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity, are proposed. More precisely, a general construction of new minimal codes using minimal codes contained in Reed-Muller codes and sets without nonzero low degree annihilators is presented. The other construction allows us to yield minimal codes from certain subcodes of Reed-Muller codes and vectorial Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity. Via these general constructions, infinite families of minimal binary linear codes of dimension $m$ and length less than or equal to $m(m+1)/2$ are obtained. Besides, a lower bound on the minimum distance of the proposed minimal linear codes is established. Conjectures and open problems are also presented. The results of this paper show that Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity have nice applications in several fields additionally to symmetric cryptography, such as coding theory and secret sharing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNN)‐based automatic segmentation of medical images has become one of the hot topics in clinical disease diagnosis. It is still a challenging task to improve the segmentation accuracy of the network model with the large variation of pathological regions in different patients and the fuzzy boundary of pathological regions. A Dual‐path Multi‐scale Attention Guided network (DMAGNet) for medical image segmentation is proposed in this paper. First, the Dual‐path Multi‐scale Attention Fusion Module (DMAF) is proposed as a novel skip connection strategy, which is applied to encode semantic dependencies between high‐level and low‐level channels. Second, the Multi‐scale Normalized Channel Attention Module (MNCA) based on the atrous convolution, normalization channel attention mechanism, and the Depthwise Separable Convolutions (DSConv) is developed to strengthen dependencies between channels. Finally, the encoder–decoder backbone employs the DSConv, as well as the pretrained Resnet34 block is combined in the encoder part to further improve the backbone network performance. Comprehensive experiments on brain, lung, and liver segmentation tasks show that the proposed DMAGNet outperforms the original U‐Net method and other advanced methods. First, the Dual‐path Multi‐scale Attention Fusion Module (DMAF) is proposed as a novel skip connection strategy, which is applied to encode semantic dependencies between high‐level and low‐level channels. Second, the Multi‐scale Normalized Channel Attention Module (MNCA) based on the atrous convolution, normalization channel attention mechanism, and the Depthwise Separable Convolutions (DSConv) is developed to strengthen dependencies between channels. Finally, the encoder–decoder backbone employs the DSConv, as well as the pretrained Resnet34 block is combined in the encoder part to further improve the backbone network performance. Comprehensive experiments on brain, lung, and liver segmentation tasks show that the proposed DMAGNet outperforms the original U‐Net method and other advanced methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a part of our contribution to research on the enhancement of network automatic speech recognition system performance. We built a highly configurable platform by using hidden Markov models, Gaussian mixture models, and Mel frequency spectral coefficients, in addition to VoIP G.711-u and GSM codecs. To determine the optimal values for maximum performance, different acoustic models are prepared by varying the hidden Markov models (from 3 to 5) and Gaussian mixture models (8–16-32) with 13 feature extraction coefficients. Additionally, our generated acoustic models are tested by unencoded and encoded speech data based on G.711 and GSM codecs. The best parameterization performance is obtained for 3 HMM, 8–16 GMMs, and G.711 codecs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing deep learning architectures usually use a separate encoder and decoder to generate the desired simulated images, which is inefficient for feature analysis and synthesis. Aiming at the problem that the existing methods fail to fully utilize the correlation of codecs, this paper focuses on the codec-unified invertible networks to accurately guide the image deblurring process by controlling latent variables. Inspired by U-Net, a U-shaped multi-level invertible network (UML-IN) is proposed by integrating the wavelet invertible networks into a supervised U-shape architecture to establish the multi-resolution correlation between blurry and sharp image features under the guidance of hybrid loss. Further, this paper proposes to use L 1 regularization constraints to obtain sparse latent variables, thereby alleviating the information dispersion problem caused by high-dimensional inference in invertible networks. Finally, we fine-tune the weights of invertible modules by calculating a similarity loss between blur-sharp variable pairs. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic blurry sets show that the proposed approach is efficient and competitive compared with the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tang and Ding [IEEE IT 67 (2021) 244-254] studied the class of BCH codes $\mathcal {C}_{(q,q+1,4,1)}$ and their dual codes with $q=2^{m}$ and established that the codewords of the minimum (or the second minimum) weight in these codes support 4-designs or 3-designs. Motivated by this, we further investigate the codewords of the next adjacent weight in such codes and discover more infinite classes of $t$ -designs with $t=3,4$. In particular, we prove that codewords of weight 7 in $\mathcal {C}_{(q,q+1,4,1)}$ support 4-designs for odd $m \geqslant 5$ and they support 3-designs for even $m \geqslant 4$ , which provide infinite classes of simple $t$ -designs with new parameters. Another significant class of $t$ -designs we produce in this paper has complementary designs with parameters 4- $(2^{2s+1}+ 1,5,5)$ ; these designs have the smallest index among all the known simple 4- $(q+1,5,\lambda)$ designs derived from codes for prime powers $q$ ; and they are further proved to be isomorphic to the 4-designs admitting the projective general linear group PGL $(2,2^{2s+1})$ as the automorphism group constructed by Alltop in 1969. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erasure codes are essential for providing efficient resilience against node failures in distributed storage. Typically, an $[n, k]$ erasure code encodes $k$ symbols into $n$ symbols which are then stored in different nodes. Recent work by Kadekodi et al. shows that the failure rates of storage nodes vary significantly over time, and that changing the rate of the code (via a change in $n$ and $k$) in response to such variations provides substantial storage space savings. However, the resource overhead of re-encoding the already encoded data is prohibitively high. We present a new theoretical framework formalizing code conversion—the process of converting data encoded with an $[n^{ I}, k^{ I}]$ code into data encoded with an $[{n^{ F}}, {k^{ F}}]$ code while maintaining desired decodability properties. We then introduce convertible codes, a new class of codes that allow for code conversions in a resource-efficient manner. This paper begins the study on convertible codes by focusing on linear MDS codes and the access cost of conversion. We derive a lower bound on the access cost of conversion and present an explicit optimal construction matching this bound for an important subclass of conversions. Additionally, we propose constructions with low field-size requirement for a broad subset of parameters. Our results show that it is possible to achieve code conversions with significantly less resources than the default approach of re-encoding for a wide range of parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, subfield codes of geometric codes over large finite fields ${\mathrm {GF}}(q)$ with dimension 3 and 4 were studied and distance-optimal subfield codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(p)$ were obtained, where $q=p^{m}$. The key idea for obtaining very good subfield codes over small fields is to choose very good linear codes over an extension field with small dimension. This paper first presents a general construction of $[q+1, 2, q]$ MDS codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(q)$ , and then studies the subfield codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(p)$ of some of the $[q+1, 2,q]$ MDS codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(q)$. Two families of dimension-optimal codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(p)$ are obtained, and several families of nearly optimal codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(p)$ are produced. Several open problems are also proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear codes generated by component functions of perfect nonlinear (PN for short) and almost perfect nonlinear (APN for short) functions and the first-order Reed-Muller codes have been an object of intensive study in coding theory. The objective of this paper is to investigate some binary shortened codes of two families of linear codes from APN functions and some $p$ -ary shortened codes associated with PN functions. The weight distributions of these shortened codes and the parameters of their duals are determined. The parameters of these binary codes and $p$ -ary codes are flexible. Many of the codes presented in this paper are optimal or almost optimal. The results of this paper show that the shortening technique is very promising for constructing good codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The occurrences of Multiple Cell Upset (MCU) are more liable to arise in modern memory systems with the continuous upgradation of microelectronics technology from micron to deep submicron scales. These MCUs are mainly induced due to radiations in memory systems. Error Correcting Codes (ECCs) with lower design complexity are generally preferred for the mitigation of MCUs. The major drawback of the existing ECC is requiring higher overheads as error correction capability increases. In this paper, authors have proposed a new class of high performance t -bit Burst Error Correcting (BEC) codes. Parity check matrices (H) have been proposed for 3-bit and 4-bit BEC codes with word lengths of 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit. Also a simplified decoding scheme has been introduced for these codes. The proposed codecs have been designed and implemented in FPGA and ASIC platforms. The proposed codecs are compact in area, faster in speed and efficient in power compared to existing related schemes. But these lower design constrains are achieved at the cost of increase in redundancy. So, the proposed codecs can be employed in applications where redundancy is not the only constrain for correcting t -bit burst errors caused by MCUs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reliability of Static Random Access Memories (SRAMs) is immensely affected by radiation induced soft errors. Multiple Cell Upsets (MCUs) are caused by these soft errors and this lead to data corruption in several SRAM cells. Error Correcting Codes are normally exploited to alleviate the effect of MCUs. Single Error Correction–Double Error Detection (SEC–DED) codes are not the appropriate preference against MCUs rather these codes are suitable for protecting SRAM cells against Single Cell Upset. Single Error Correction–Double Error Detection–Double Adjacent Error Correction (SEC–DED–DAEC) codes are more suitable due to increasing trends of single and double-adjacent errors in SRAM cells. In this paper, a new SEC–DED–DAEC code has been proposed which is proficient of correcting single and double-adjacent errors in SRAMs. Our newly proposed code has been termed as Single and Double-adjacent Error Correcting Code (SDECC). Proposed codecs have been designed by employing new parity check matrices for different word lengths which are frequently applied in memory. The mis-correction probability of proposed SDECC codes are up to 88.24% and 80.67% lesser for 2-random and 3-random bit errors respectively with respect to related existing designs. Proposed codecs have been replicated and synthesized in ASIC environment. It is observed that area and power consumption of the proposed codecs are reduced up to 8.93% and 21.47% compared to the recently published results respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insertion–deletion codes (insdel codes for short) play an important role in synchronization error correction. The higher the minimum insdel distance, the more insdel errors the code can correct. Haeupler and Shahrasbi established the Singleton bound for insdel codes: the minimum insdel distance of any $[n,k]$ linear code over $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ satisfies $d\leq 2n-2k+2$. There have been some constructions of insdel codes through Reed-Solomon codes with high capabilities, but none has come close to this bound. Recently, Do Duc et al. showed that the minimum insdel distance of any $[n,k]$ Reed-Solomon code is no more than $2n-2k$ if $q$ is large enough compared to the code length $n$ ; optimal codes that meet the new bound were also constructed explicitly. The contribution of this paper is twofold. We first show that the minimum insdel distance of any $[n,k]$ linear code over $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ satisfies $d\leq 2n-2k$ if $n > k > 1$. This result improves and generalizes the previously known results in the literature. We then give a sufficient condition under which the minimum insdel distance of a 2-D Reed-Solomon code of length $n$ over $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ is exactly equal to $2n-4$. As a consequence, we show that the sufficient condition is not hard to achieve; we explicitly construct an infinite family of optimal 2-D Reed-Somolom codes meeting the bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well-known that cyclic codes have efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. In recent years, antiprimitive BCH codes have attracted a lot of attention. The objective of this paper is to study BCH codes of this type over finite fields and analyse their parameters. Some lower bounds on the minimum distance of antiprimitive BCH codes are given. The BCH codes presented in this paper have good parameters in general, containing many optimal linear codes. In particular, two open problems about the minimum distance of BCH codes of this type are partially solved in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce the notion of generalized pair weights of an $[n, k]$ -linear code over the finite field $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ and the notion of pair $r$ -equiweight codes, where $1\le r\le k-1$. Some basic properties of generalized pair weights of linear codes over finite fields are derived. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for an $[n,k]$ -linear code to be a pair equiweight code, and we characterize pair $r$ -equiweight codes for any $1\le r\le k-1$. A necessary and sufficient condition for a linear isomorphism to preserve pair weights between two linear codes is obtained. At the end of this paper, an application of generalized pair weights of linear codes to symbol-pair read wire-tap channels of type II is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the problem of constructing codes correcting deletions in arrays. Under this model, it is assumed that an $n \times n$ array can experience deletions of rows and columns. These deletion errors are referred to as $({t_{\mathrm {r}}}, {t_{\mathrm {c}}})$ -criss-cross deletions if ${t_{\mathrm {r}}}$ rows and ${t_{\mathrm {c}}}$ columns are deleted, while a code correcting these deletion patterns is called a $({t_{\mathrm {r}}}, {t_{\mathrm {c}}})$ -criss-cross deletion correction code. The definitions for criss-cross insertions are similar. It is first shown that when $t_{r}=t_{c}$ the problems of correcting criss-cross deletions and criss-cross insertions are equivalent. The focus of this paper lies on the case of (1, 1)-criss-cross deletions. A non-asymptotic upper bound on the cardinality of (1, 1)-criss-cross deletion correction codes is shown which assures that the redundancy is at least $2n-3+2\log n$ bits. A code construction with an existential encoding and an explicit decoding algorithm is presented. The redundancy of the construction is at most $2n+4 \log n + 7 +2 \log e$. A construction with explicit encoder and decoder is presented. The explicit encoder adds an extra $5\log n + 5$ bits of redundancy to the construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is challenging to enable fast channel switching and packet-loss repair in low-delay live video distribution without negatively influencing the steady-state viewing performance. For example, regularly breaking the inter-frame dependency by introducing intra-predicted keyframes enables random access, but is costly in terms of rate-distortion performance. For this reason, the keyframe-injection method minimizes the impact by sending a compression-efficient normal video stream to all end-users. As accompaniment, a companion stream that solely consists of keyframes is sporadically used for only those users that switch channels or experience packet loss. This paper describes the requirements to implement keyframe injection in three video coding standard generations (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC). We evaluated the impact that keyframe injection has on the quality of the video in terms of a decrease in VMAF, PSNR and SSIM. We demonstrate that the quality reduction caused by keyframe insertion is generally low, meaning that keyframe injection typically is imperceptible. However, drift-error artifacts become perceptible over time for rare outliers. Moreover, we pinpointed the cause of this worst-case artifact type to be halfpel interpolation. As a solution, codecs can disable subpel motion estimation, and future standards could design their filters more carefully. Lastly, it should be noted that keyframe injection will only be applied sporadically when users require a random access or experience packet loss, and only to those users. Most interestingly, all other users receive a compression-efficient stream wherein the inter-frame dependency is not artificially broken at regular short intervals. As such, our proposed solution makes low-latency video distribution efficient and viable in multiple coding standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new event cameras are now widely used in many computer vision applications. Their high raw data bitrate levels require a more efficient fixed-length representation for low-bandwidth transmission from the event sensor to the processing chip. A novel low-complexity lossless compression framework is proposed for encoding the synchronous event frames (EFs) by introducing a novel memory-efficient fixed-length representation suitable for hardware implementation in the very-low-power (VLP) event-processing chip. A first contribution proposes an improved representation of the ternary frames using pixel-group frame partitioning and symbol remapping. Another contribution proposes a novel low-complexity memory-efficient fixed-length representation using multi-level lookup tables (LUTs). Complex experimental analysis is performed using a set of group-size configurations. For very-large group-size configurations, an improved representation is proposed using a mask-LUT structure. The experimental evaluation on a public dataset demonstrates that the proposed fixed-length coding framework provides at least two times the compression ratio relative to the raw EF representation and a close performance compared with variable-length video coding standards and variable-length state-of-the-art image codecs for lossless compression of ternary EFs generated at frequencies bellow one KHz. To our knowledge, the paper is the first to introduce a low-complexity memory-efficient fixed-length representation for lossless compression of synchronous EFs, suitable for integration into a VLP event-processing chip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on constructions of MDS self-dual codes from (extended) generalized Reed-Solomon (GRS) codes. Let $q = r^{2}$ be an odd prime power. We show that, there exists a $q$ -ary self-dual (extended) GRS code for each even length in the range $[{2r,3r-3}]$ , and for each singly even length in the range $[3r-1,4r]$. This extends the only known consecutive range $[2,2r]$ to $[{2,3r-3}]$ for this case. Furthermore, our general constructions provide many MDS self-dual codes with new parameters which, to the best of our knowledge, were not reported before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-orthogonal codes are an important type of linear codes due to their wide applications in communication and cryptography. The Euclidean (or Hermitian) hull of a linear code is defined to be the intersection of the code and its Euclidean (or Hermitian) dual. It is clear that the hull is self-orthogonal. The main goal of this paper is to obtain self-orthogonal codes by investigating the hulls. Let $\mathcal {C}_{(r,r^{m}-1,\delta,b)}$ be the primitive BCH code over $\mathbb {F}_{r}$ of length $r^{m}-1$ with designed distance $\delta $ , where $\mathbb {F}_{r}$ is the finite field of order $r$. In this paper, we will present Euclidean (or Hermitian) self-orthogonal codes and determine their parameters by investigating the Euclidean (or Hermitian) hulls of some primitive BCH codes. Several sufficient and necessary conditions for primitive BCH codes with large Hermitian hulls are developed by presenting lower and upper bounds on their designed distances. Furthermore, some Hermitian self-orthogonal codes are proposed via the hulls of BCH codes and their parameters are also investigated. In addition, we determine the dimensions of the code $\mathcal {C}_{(r,r^{2}-1,\delta,1)}$ and its hull in both Hermitian and Euclidean cases for $2 \le \delta \le r^{2}-1$. We also present two sufficient and necessary conditions on designed distances such that the hull has the largest dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both linear complementary dual (LCD) codes and maximum distance separable (MDS) codes have good algebraic structures, and they have interesting practical applications such as communication systems, data storage, quantum codes, and so on. So far, most of LCD MDS codes have been constructed by employing generalized Reed-Solomon codes. In this paper we construct some classes of new Euclidean LCD MDS codes and Hermitian LCD MDS codes which are not monomially equivalent to Reed-Solomon codes, called LCD MDS codes of non-Reed-Solomon type. Our method is based on the constructions of Beelen et al. (2017) and Roth and Lempel (1989). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper on the construction of LCD MDS codes of non-Reed-Solomon type; any LCD MDS code of non-Reed-Solomon type constructed by our method is not monomially equivalent to any LCD code constructed by the method of Carlet et al. (2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech coding has been shown to achieve good speech quality using either waveform matching or parametric reconstruction. For very low bit rate streams, recently developed generative speech models can reconstruct high‐quality wideband speech from the bit streams of standard parametric encoders at less than 3 kb/s. Generative codecs produce high‐quality speech based on synthesising speech from a DNN and the parametric input. Existing objective speech quality models (e.g., ViSQOL and POLQA) cannot be used to accurately evaluate the quality of coded speech from generative models as they penalise based on signal differences not apparent in subjective listening test results. This paper presents WARP‐Q, a full‐reference objective speech quality metric that uses a dynamic time warping cost for MFCC representations of the signals. It is robust to low perceptual signal changes introduced by low bit rate neural vocoders. An evaluation using waveform matching, parametric, and generative neural vocoder‐based codecs as well as channel and environmental noise shows that WARP‐Q has better correlation and codec quality ranking for novel codecs compared to traditional metrics as well as the versatility of capturing other types of degradations, such as additive noise and transmission channel degradations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The binary quadratic-residue codes and the punctured Reed-Muller codes ${\mathcal {R}}_{2}((m-1)/2, m))$ are two families of binary cyclic codes with parameters $[n, (n+1)/2, d \geq \sqrt {n}]$. These two families of binary cyclic codes are interesting partly due to the fact that their minimum distances have a square-root bound. The objective of this paper is to construct two families of binary cyclic codes of length $2^{m}-1$ and dimension near $2^{m-1}$ with good minimum distances. When $m \geq 3$ is odd, the codes become a family of duadic codes with parameters $[2^{m}-1, 2^{m-1}, d]$ , where $d \geq 2^{(m-1)/2}+1$ if $m \equiv 3 \pmod {4}$ and $d \geq 2^{(m-1)/2}+3$ if $m \equiv 1 \pmod {4}$. The two families of binary cyclic codes contain some optimal binary cyclic codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twisted generalized Reed-Solomon (TGRS) codes are a family of codes that contains a large number of maximum distance separable (MDS) codes that are non-equivalent to generalized Reed-Solomon (GRS) codes. In this paper, we characterize a sufficient and necessary condition that a twisted Reed-Solomon (TRS) code with two twists is MDS; give a sufficient and necessary condition that a TGRS code with two twists is self-dual, and present some constructions of self-dual TGRS codes. These self-dual codes are MDS, NMDS or 2-MDS. Furthermore, we study the non-GRS properties of TGRS codes with two twists and prove that these codes are non-GRS in most cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IP-PBX have grown considerably in the telecoms and IT industries in recent times due to their low cost, high customizability, open source and hardware-independent nature. Unlike traditional PBX systems that are TDM-based and require a separate wired infrastructure to operate, an IP PBX can be attached to the local LAN and uses SIP with RTP over Internet Protocol (IP) for signaling and data transport, respectively. Asterisk-based IP PBX has become a de facto standard for open-source low-to-medium calling capacity requirements. Single Board Computers (SBCs) are attracting considerable attention from academics, hobbyists and the industry, due to their compact size, low cost, low power, portability and fair processing ability. Raspberry Pi series SBCs are the pioneer in the field, having Pi, Pi2, Pi3 and Pi Zero in production, supporting different processing and storage capabilities. An IP PBX embedded on the raspberry Pi SBC can serve an adequate number of users and provide a tiny platform that can fit in a pocket and be transported anywhere while preserving the functionality of a complete IP PBX. Such systems can be phenomenally successful in situations where large infrastructures cannot be taken, for instance, in warzones or disaster-affected areas where communication networks are damaged, necessitating an immediate requirement for an ad hoc-based communication system. In this paper, we aim to explore the performance of an Asterisk®-based IP PBX installed on a Raspberry Pi 3 (model B) platform in terms of concurrent call handling using different codecs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advancement in next-generation communication technologies, the so-called Tactile Internet is getting more attention due to its smart applications, such as haptic-enabled teleoperation systems. The stringent requirements such as delay, jitter, and packet loss of these delay-sensitive and loss-intolerant applications make it more challenging to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). In this regard, different haptic codec and control schemes were proposed for QoS and QoE provisioning in the Tactile Internet. However, they maximize the QoE while degrading the system's stability under varying delays and high packet rates. In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning-based Intelligent Tactile Edge (ITE) framework to ensure both transparency and stability of teleoperation systems with high packet rates and variable time delay communication networks. The proposed ITE first estimates the network challenges, including communication delay, jitter, and packet loss, and then utilizes a Q-learning algorithm to select the optimal haptic codec scheme to reduce network load. The proposed framework aims to explore the optimal relationship between QoS and QoE parameters and make the tradeoff between stability and transparency during teleoperations. The simulation result indicates that the proposed strategy chooses the optimal scheme under different network impairments corresponding to the congestion level in the communication network while improving the QoS and maximizing the QoE. The end-to-end performance of throughput (1.5 Mbps) and average RTT (70 ms) during haptic communication is achieved with a learning rate and discounted factor value of 0.5 and 0.8, respectively. The results indicate that the communication system can successfully achieve the QoS and QoE requirements by employing the proposed ITE framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent trend in neural image compression (NIC) research could be generally grounded into two categories: analysis-synthesis transform network improvements and entropy estimation optimization. They promote the compression efficiency of NIC by leveraging more expressive network structures and advanced entropy models respectively. From a different but more systematic viewpoint, we extend the horizon of NIC from software- to hardware-based lossy compression using more resource-constrained platforms, such as field programmable gate array (FPGA) or deep-learning processor unit (DPU). In this paper, we propose a novel hardware-oriented NIC system for real-time edge-computing video services. We for the first time present FPX-NIC, an FPGA-accelerated NIC framework designed for hardware encoding, which consists of a novel NIC scheme and an energy-efficient neural network (NN) deployment method. The former contribution is a block-based adaptive NIC approach based on local content characteristics. Essential side-information is also signalled to realize adaptive patch representation. The critical advantage of our latter contribution lies in the network-reconfigurable framework plus fixed-precision weights quantization method that takes advantage of quantization-aware post training procedure to compensate the performance degradation caused by quantization error. Therefore it is able to improve both processing speed and energy efficiency. We finally establish an intelligent video coding system using the proposed scheme, enabling visual capturing, neural encoding, decoding, and display, realizing 4K ultra-high-definition (UHD) all intra neural video coding on edge-computing devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents research of lossy coding impact on speech recognition with convolutional neural networks. For this purpose, google speech commands dataset containing utterances of 30 words was encoded using four most common all-purpose codecs: mp3, aac, wma and ogg. A convolutional neural network was taught using part of the original files and later tested with the rest of the files, as well as their counterparts encoded with different codecs and bitrates. The same network model was also taught using mp3 encoded data showing the biggest loss in effectiveness of the previous network. Results show that lossy coding does have an effect on speech recognition, especially for low bitrates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Binary quasi-reversible BCH codes whose defining set contains consecutive elements from negative to positive integers have received considerable attention in recent years due to their efficient decoding suitable for a wide range of applications. This paper combines the concept of the weight and quasi-reversible structures to introduce two subclasses of BCH codes: odd-like/even-like quasi-reversible BCH codes. The step-by-step decoding of these codes is developed as follows: First, the weight evaluation of a received polynomial is able to judge whether the number of errors is odd or even, which helps to simplify the decoding processes. Second, based on Chiò’s pivotal condensation process which can be easily implemented in a parallel computing architecture, the determinant calculation of the band matrix instead of Peterson’s matrix in column-echelon form is faster. Third, a newly proposed non-monic error-locator polynomial is sparser than the conventional ones. As a consequence, the theoretical analysis and experimental results validate potential benefits in requiring fewer finite field additions and multiplications used in the decoding of binary odd-like/even-like quasi-reversible BCH codes up to half the minimum distance when compared with the narrow-sense BCH codes with small error-correcting capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maximum distance separable (MDS) codes are very important in both theory and practice. There is a classical construction of a family of $[{2^{m}+1, 2u-1, 2^{m}-2u+3}]$ MDS codes for $1 \leq u \leq 2^{m-1}$ , which are cyclic, reversible and BCH codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(2^{m})$. The objective of this paper is to study the quaternary subfield subcodes and quaternary subfield codes of a subfamily of the MDS codes for even $m$. A family of quaternary cyclic codes is obtained. These quaternary codes are distance-optimal in some cases and very good in general. Furthermore, two infinite families of 3-designs from these quaternary codes and their duals are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image compression is one of the most fundamental techniques and commonly used applications in the image and video processing field. Earlier methods built a well-designed pipeline, and efforts were made to improve all modules of the pipeline by handcrafted tuning. Later, tremendous contributions were made, especially when data-driven methods revitalized the domain with their excellent modeling capacities and flexibility in incorporating newly designed modules and constraints. Despite great progress, a systematic benchmark and comprehensive analysis of end-to-end learned image compression methods are lacking. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive literature survey of learned image compression methods. The literature is organized based on several aspects to jointly optimize the rate-distortion performance with a neural network, i.e., network architecture, entropy model and rate control. We describe milestones in cutting-edge learned image-compression methods, review a broad range of existing works, and provide insights into their historical development routes. With this survey, the main challenges of image compression methods are revealed, along with opportunities to address the related issues with recent advanced learning methods. This analysis provides an opportunity to take a further step towards higher-efficiency image compression. By introducing a coarse-to-fine hyperprior model for entropy estimation and signal reconstruction, we achieve improved rate-distortion performance, especially on high-resolution images. Extensive benchmark experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model in rate-distortion performance and time complexity on multi-core CPUs and GPUs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While humans can effortlessly transform complex visual scenes into simple words and the other way around by leveraging their high-level understanding of the content, conventional or the more recent learned image compression codecs do not seem to utilize the semantic meanings of visual content to their full potential. Moreover, they focus mostly on rate-distortion and tend to underperform in perception quality especially in low bitrate regime, and often disregard the performance of downstream computer vision algorithms, which is a fast-growing consumer group of compressed images in addition to human viewers. In this paper, we (1) present a generic framework that can enable any image codec to leverage high-level semantics and (2) study the joint optimization of perception quality and distortion. Our idea is that given any codec, we utilize high-level semantics to augment the low-level visual features extracted by it and produce essentially a new, semantic-aware codec. We propose a three-phase training scheme that teaches semantic-aware codecs to leverage the power of semantic to jointly optimize rate-perception-distortion (R-PD) performance. As an additional benefit, semantic-aware codecs also boost the performance of downstream computer vision algorithms. To validate our claim, we perform extensive empirical evaluations and provide both quantitative and qualitative results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Streaming music has dominated the digital music industry in recent years, which allows users to enjoy a huge music library online with a low subscription price. Terminal-side audio DRM (Digital Right Management) is very critical for streaming music industry, compromising of which will cause unrestricted listening, dumping and unauthorized secondary distribution. However, existing DRM protection schemes mainly focus on defeating software attacks but lack complete shielding against the physical memory disclosure attacks, which may even be launched by the owner of the terminal device. In this paper, we propose a terminal-side audio DRM solution called TrustSAMP to protect the copyrighted audio data against both software attacks and physical memory disclosure attacks. The basic idea is to process the audio data plaintext only in certain on-SoC components secured by ARM TrustZone. To minimize the TCB (Trusted Computing Base) of the secure world, we separate the control flow and the data flow of the Linux audio subsystem and port only the codes used for audio data decryption and plaintext transfer into the secure world. Moreover, we leave most driver codes of the audio-associated on-SoC components in the rich OS (i.e., in the normal world), and introduce a tiny proxy in the secure world to control the associated registers according to the requests from the normal-world drivers. The prototype implemented on real hardware shows that TrustSAMP can play a variety of wav-format audio with very small overhead and negligible loss of audio quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we construct four families of linear codes over finite fields from the complements of either the union of subfields or the union of cosets of a subfield, which can produce infinite families of optimal linear codes, including infinite families of (near) Griesmer codes. We also characterize the optimality of these four families of linear codes with an explicit computable criterion using the Griesmer bound and obtain many distance-optimal linear codes. In addition, by a more in-depth discussion on some special cases of these four families of linear codes, we obtain several classes of (distance-)optimal linear codes with few weights and completely determine their weight distributions. It is shown that most of our linear codes are self-orthogonal or minimal which are useful in applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combinatorial designs are closely related to linear codes. Recently, some near MDS codes were employed to construct $t$ -designs by Ding and Tang, which settles the question as to whether there exists an infinite family of near MDS codes holding an infinite family of $t$ -designs for $t \geq 2$. This paper is devoted to the construction of infinite families of 3-designs and 2-designs from special equations over finite fields. First, we present an infinite family of almost MDS codes over ${\mathrm{ GF}}(p^{m})$ holding an infinite family of 3-designs. We then provide an infinite family of almost MDS codes over ${\mathrm{ GF}}(p^{m})$ holding an infinite family of 2-designs for any field ${\mathrm{ GF}}(q)$. In particular, some of these almost MDS codes are near MDS. Second, we present an infinite family of near MDS codes over ${\mathrm{ GF}}(2^{m})$ holding an infinite family of 3-designs by considering the number of roots of a special linearized polynomial. Compared to previous constructions of 3-designs or 2-designs from linear codes, the parameters of some of our designs are new and flexible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent works on learned image compression perform encoding and decoding processes in a full-resolution manner, resulting in two problems when deployed for practical applications. First, parallel acceleration of the autoregressive entropy model cannot be achieved due to serial decoding. Second, full-resolution inference often causes the out-of-memory (OOM) problem with limited GPU resources, especially for high-resolution images. Block partition is a good choice to handle the above issues, but it brings about new challenges in reducing the redundancy between blocks and eliminating block effects. To tackle the above challenges, this paper provides a learned block-based hybrid image compression (LBHIC) framework. Specifically, we introduce explicit intra prediction into a learned image compression framework to utilize the relation among adjacent blocks. Superior to context modeling by linear weighting of neighbor pixels in traditional codecs, we propose a contextual prediction module (CPM) to better capture long-range correlations by utilizing the strip pooling to extract the most relevant information in neighboring latent space, thus achieving effective information prediction. Moreover, to alleviate blocking artifacts, we further propose a boundary-aware postprocessing module (BPM) with the edge importance taken into account. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed LBHIC codec outperforms the VVC, with a bit-rate conservation of 4.1%, and reduces the decoding time by approximately 86.7% compared with that of state-of-the-art learned image compression methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the problem of correcting multiple criss-cross insertions and deletions in arrays. More precisely, we study the unique recovery of $n \times n$ arrays affected by ${t}$ -criss-cross deletions defined as any combination of ${t_{\mathrm {r}}}$ row and ${t_{\mathrm {c}}}$ column deletions such that ${t_{\mathrm {r}}}+ {t_{\mathrm {c}}}= {t}$ for a given $t$. We show an equivalence between correcting ${t}$ -criss-cross deletions and ${t}$ -criss-cross insertions and show that a code correcting ${t}$ -criss-cross insertions/deletions has redundancy at least ${t} n + {t}\log n - \log ({t}!)$. Then, we present an existential construction of a ${t}$ -criss-cross insertion/deletion correcting code with redundancy bounded from above by ${t} n + \mathcal {O}({t}^{2} \log ^{2} n)$. The main ingredients of the presented code construction are systematic binary ${t}$ -deletion correcting codes and Gabidulin codes. The first ingredient helps locating the indices of the inserted/deleted rows and columns, thus transforming the insertion/deletion-correction problem into a row/column erasure-correction problem which is then solved using the second ingredient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we mainly study quaternary linear codes and their binary subfield codes. First we obtain a general explicit relationship between quaternary linear codes and their binary subfield codes in terms of generator matrices and defining sets. Second, we construct quaternary linear codes via simplicial complexes and determine the weight distributions of these codes. Third, the weight distributions of the binary subfield codes of these quaternary codes are also computed by employing the general characterization. Furthermore, we present two infinite families of optimal linear codes with respect to the Griesmer Bound, and a class of binary almost optimal codes with respect to the Sphere Packing Bound. We also need to emphasize that we obtain at least 9 new quaternary linear codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the recently developed quasi-reversible BCH codes with long lengths and high error-correcting capability, this paper is aimed at proposing a new and faster decoding procedure. It consists of four steps: 1) compute the consecutive syndromes; 2) calculate the syndrome functions by the forward and backward recursions; 3) solve a linear subsystem together with one matrix multiplication in order to find an error-locator polynomial; 4) determine the errors from the obtained polynomial by using the root-finding algorithm. This procedure, especially in Steps 2 and 3, differs greatly from the conventional procedures, which determine an error-locator polynomial directly from solving a linear system with the aid of the consecutive syndromes. The key idea behind this decoding technique is that the computational complexity of such a small subsystem instead of an originally large linear system can be significantly reduced, although there are additional forward and backward syndrome calculations with low complexity increasing. Finally, the illustrative examples and numerical simulations can be helpful to demonstrate the accuracy and efficacy of the presented decoding technique at different error-correcting capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]