SVG (scalable vector graphics) has become the standard format for 2D graphics in HTML5. Although some image-to-SVG conversion systems had been proposed, the sizes of files they produced are still large. In [1], we proposed a new system to convert raster comic images into vector SVG files. The compression ratio is better than the previous methods. However, these methods do not process text in raster images. In this paper, we improve our system to recognize text elements in the comic and use these text elements to provide better compression and novel applications. The proposed method uses SCW (sliding concentric windows) and SVM (support vector machine) to identify text regions. Then, OCR (optical character recognition) is applied to recognize text elements in those regions. Instead of encoding the text regions as vectors, the text elements are embedded in the SVG file along with their coordinate values. Experimental results show that we can reduce the file sizes to about 52% of the original SVG files. Using these text elements, we can translate comics into other languages to provide multilingual services easily. Text/content-based image search can be supported efficiently. It can also provide a novel application system for story teller.

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Traditional two-dimensional (2-D) barcodes, such as the QR code and PDF417, do not carry visual information. This work proposes a visually meaningful 2-D barcode (or 2-D image code) that carries not only hidden information, but also visual information. Watermarking is employed to hide information in a meaningful cover image to produce the 2-D image code. The 2-D image code can be printed or displayed and then captured using a camera-equipped mobile device. The hidden information is extracted for innovative applications. To resist distortions in the print-and-photo process, a perceptual shaping algorithm, based on Watson's DCT-based perceptual model, is proposed for use in the data hiding procedure. The detection performance that can be achieved using two classes of position-detection patterns is evaluated, and the best pattern is then used as a part of the 2-D image code. A web service is provided for generating the 2-D image codes and a Java-based decoder is developed for mobile phones. The results of practical experiments reveal the applicability, robustness, and high capacity of the proposed 2-D image code. C 2011 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

Video surveillance systems are playing an important role to protect lives and assets of individuals, enterprises and governments. Due to the prevalence of wired and wireless access to Internet, it would be a trend to integrate present isolated video surveillance systems by applying distributed computing environment and to further gestate diversified multimedia intelligent surveillance (MIS) applications in ubiquity. In this paper, we propose a distributed and secure architecture for ubiquitous video surveillance (UVS) services over Internet and error-prone wireless networks with scalability, ubiquity and privacy. As cloud computing, users consume UVS related resources as a service and do not need to own the physical infrastructure, platform, or software. To protect the service privacy, preserve the service scalability and provide reliable UVS video streaming for end users, we apply the AES security mechanism, multicast overlay network and forward error correction (FEC), respectively. Different value-added services can be created and added to this architecture without introducing much traffic load and degrading service quality. Besides, we construct an experimental test-bed for UVS system with three kinds of services to detect fire and fallincident features and record the captured video at the same time. Experimental results showed that the proposed distributed service architecture is effective and numbers of services on different multicast islands were successfully connected without influencing the playback quality. The average sending rate and the receiving rates of these services are quite similar, and the surveillance video is smoothly played.

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