Advanced algorithms for information science

This is the final report of a one-year, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). In a modern information-controlled society the importance of fast computational algorithms facilitating data compression and image analysis cannot be overemphasized. Feature extraction and pattern recognition are key to many LANL projects and the same types of dimensionality reduction and compression used in source coding are also applicable to image understanding. The authors have begun developing wavelet coding which decomposes data into different length-scale and frequency bands. New transform-based source-coding techniques offer potential for achieving better, combined source-channel coding performance by using joint-optimization techniques. They initiated work on a system that compresses the video stream in real time, and which also takes the additional step of analyzing the video stream concurrently. By using object-based compression schemes (where an object is an identifiable feature of the video signal, repeatable in time or space), they believe that the analysis is directly related to the efficiency of the compression