To get better and flexible performance, region-based image coding has been studied widely in the last few years. In region-based image coding, the whole image can be divided into two parts: region-of-interest (ROI) and background area. ROI is coded in low compression ratio, while background area is coded in high compression ratio. In this paper, shape-adaptive DCT (SA-DCT) for coding arbitraril...

Cardiac melanocyte-like cells (CMLCs) contribute to atrial arrhythmias when missing the melanin synthesis enzyme dopachrome tautomerase (Dct). While scavenging reactive oxygen species (ROS) in Dct-null mice partially suppressed atrial arrhythmias, it remains unclear if CMLCs influence atrial ROS and structure or if the electrical response of CMLCs to ROS differs from that of atrial myocytes. Th...

The L-type calcium channel (LTCC) provides trigger Ca(2+) for sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca-release, and LTCC function is influenced by interacting proteins including the LTCC distal COOH terminus (DCT) and calmodulin. DCT is proteolytically cleaved and reassociates with the LTCC complex to regulate calcium channel function. DCT reduces LTCC barium current (I(Ba,L)) in reconstituted channel complex...

The 4×4 approximate discrete cosine transform (DCT) of H.264/AVC [1] makes it difficult to transcode the pre-coded video contents with the previous video coding standards to H.264/AVC in DCT domain. This is due to the difference between 8×8 DCT used previous standards and 4×4 DCT in H.264/AVC. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm that converts the quantized 8×8 DCT block of MPEG-2 i...

The tyrosinase family comprises three members, tyrosinase (Tyr), tyrosinase-related protein 1 (Tyrp1), and dopachrome tautomerase (Dct). Null mutations and deletions at the Tyr and Tyrp1 loci are known and phenotypically affect coat color due to the absence of enzyme or intracellular mislocalization. At the Dct locus, three mutations are known that lead to pigmentation phenotype. However, these...

A fast, degradation-free solution for the DCT block extraction problem is proposed. The problem is defined as extracting a DCT block from a DCT compressed frame composed of DCT blocks. This problem is encountered in both video/image manipulations in the compressed domain and transcodecs, for example, converting from MPEG to Motion JPEG. Traditionally, solutions involve using the pixel domain ma...

As powerful image editing tools are widely used, the demand for identifying the authenticity of an image is much increased. Copy-move forgery is one of the tampering techniques which are frequently used. Most existing techniques to expose this forgery need to improve the robustness for common post-processing operations and fail to precisely locate the tampering region especially when there are ...

Image retrieval is an important problem for accessing large image databases. In this paper, a content-based image retrieval method based on block DCT is proposed. Due to the energy compacting property and the ability of extracting the texture information, discrete cosine transform (DCT) is applied to extract low-level features from the images. Based on the observation that block DCT can reduce ...

We sought to assess whether the distal convoluted tubule (DCT) segment of the rabbit nephron expresses a functional epithelial sodium channel. First, the transepithelial voltage (V(te), lumen vs. bath) was measured in isolated perfused DCT segments (assessed separately in the upstream half and the downstream half of the DCT). V(te) was zero and not affected by amiloride or barium in the upstrea...