<title>CUBICORT: simulation of the visual cortical system for 3D image analysis, synthesis, and hypercompression for digital TV, HDTV, and multimedia</title>

Abstract

We describe simulation elements of a new kind of 3D vision simulator, for preprocessing objects and movement analysis in 3D, using the biological concept of the cortical column paradigm in the visual area. The target simulator is primarily dedicated to ultra high image compression for the telecommunication of digital TV images (MPEG4), HDTV, and 3D TV, but can also be used for automatic modeling, digitizing, robotics, and image synthesis. This simulator extracts 3D objects and movements by using the properties of hypercolumns within the visual cortex for spatio-temporal pyramidal filtering, learning, and performs inter and intra-cooperation between these simulated hypercolumns. The simulation process has four levels for analysis - synthesis: pixels, zones, objects and labels. Final synthesis (reconstruction) is processed by reverse filtering, using non-orthogonal basis filters. Substantial upgrades in terms of compression ratio have been estimated using this algorithm as a whole, or partially, with integrated VLSI.