A major problem in image compression is the coding of noise and noisy texture in an image. In a classic image compression approach, a transparent representation of these components is only possible with a very high bit rate. However, a pixel exact representation is not necessary in order to achieve visually perceived transparency because the human viewer is not able to distinguish two noise sig...

Majid Foodeei 1;2 and Eric Dubois 2;1 Abstract | In this contribution an entropy-constrained code-excited linear predictive quantizer (EC-CELP) is introduced. EC-CELP addresses the problems associated with high quality, low delay, low complexity, low bit rate source coding of sources with memory. The motivation comes from the applications in motion-compensated time varying image compression. As...

The diffuse plasma that fills galaxy groups and clusters (the intracluster medium, hereafter ICM) is a by-product of galaxy formation. The present thermal state of this gas results from a competition between gas cooling and heating. The heating comes from two distinct sources: gravitational heating associated with the collapse of the dark matter halo and additional thermal input from the format...

Run-length codes and their variants have recently been shown to be very effective for compressing system-on-achip (SOC) test data. In this paper, we analyze the Golomb code, the conventional run-length code and the FDR code for a binary memoryless data source, and compare the compression obtained in each case to fundamental entropy bounds. We show analytically that the FDR code outperforms both...

PUF-based key generators have been widely considered as a root-of-trust in digital systems. They typically require an error-correcting mechanism (e.g. based on the code-offset method) for dealing with bit errors between the enrollment and reconstruction of keys. When the used PUF does not have full entropy, entropy leakage between the helper data and the device-unique key material can occur. If...

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a key brain structure for decision making, behavioural flexibility and working memory. Neurons in PFC encode relevant stimuli through changes in their firing rate, although the metabolic cost of spiking activity puts strong constrains to neural codes based on firing rate modulation. Thus, how PFC neural populations code relevant information in an efficient way is ...

A sliding block code π : X → Y between shift spaces is called fiber-mixing if, for every x and x′ in X with y = π(x) = π(x′), there is z ∈ π−1(y) which is left asymptotic to x and right asymptotic to x′. A fiber-mixing factor code from a shift of finite type is a code of class degree 1 for which each point of Y has exactly one transition class. Given an infinite-to-one factor code between mixin...

We evaluated the impact of changing the observation scale over the entropy measures for text descriptions. MIDI coded Music, computer code and two human natural languages were studied at the scale of characters, words, and at the Fundamental Scale resulting from adjusting the symbols length used to interpret each text-description until it produced minimum entropy. The results show that the Fund...

In this paper, we investigate a lossy source coding problem, where an upper limit on the permitted distortion is defined for every dataset element. It can be seen as an alternative approach to rate distortion theory where a bound on the allowed average error is specified. In order to find the entropy, which gives a statistical length of source code compatible with a fixed distortion bound, a co...

A noisy non-uniformly distributed secret often needs to be transformed into a stable high-entropy key. Biometric systems and physically unclonable functions (PUFs) exemplify the need for this conversion. Secure sketches are a useful tool hereby as they alleviate the noisiness while keeping the corresponding min-entropy loss to a minimum. The novelty of our work is twofold. First, seven secure s...