Randomization in randomized controlled trials involves more than generation of a random sequence by which to assign subjects. For randomization to be successfully implemented, the randomization sequence must be adequately protected (concealed) so that investigators, involved health care providers, and subjects are not aware of the upcoming assignment. The absence of adequate allocation concealm...

Advances in display and camera technology enable new applications for three-dimensional (3D) scene communication, such as 3DTV. 3D Multi-view video contains a large amount of inter-view statistical dependencies, since all cameras capture the same scene from different viewpoints. Due to the vast raw bit rate, multi-view video data are expected to consume a large portion of available bandwidth. T...

Imperfect transmission of block-coded images often causes lost blocks. These blocks may contain very important information of image. In this paper a new error concealment scheme is proposed for restoring lost blocks of images. It is based on the robust watermark technique to restore lost blocks in the region-of-interest (ROI) and the best-neighborhood-matching (BNM) technique to restore lost bl...

Communication over today’s IP-based networks are to some extent subject to packet loss. Most real-time applications, such as video streaming, need methods to hide this effect, since resending lost packets may introduce unacceptable delays. For IP-based video streaming applications such a method is referred to as a packet loss concealment scheme. In this thesis a recently proposed mixture model ...

Proper randomisation rests on adequate allocation concealment. An allocation concealment process keeps clinicians and participants unaware of upcoming assignments. Without it, even properly developed random allocation sequences can be subverted. Within this concealment process, the crucial unbiased nature of randomised controlled trials collides with their most vexing implementation problems. P...

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) provides a way to encapsulate several video layers with increasing quality and resolution in a single bitstream. Thus it is particularly adapted to address heterogeneous networks and a wide variety of decoding devices. In this paper, we evaluate the interest of SVC in a different context, which is error concealment after transmission on networks subject to packet los...