This work presents the development of a realtime framework for the research of Multimodal Feedback of Robots/Talking Agents in the context of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). For evaluating the framework, a Multimodal corpus is built (EN-TERFACE STEAD), and a study on the important multimodal features was done for building an active Robot/Agent listener of a storytelling experience with Humans. The experiments show that even when building the same reactive behavior models for Robot and Talking Agents, the interpretation and the realization of the behavior communicated is different due to the different communicative channels Robots/Agents offer be it physical but less human-like in Robots, and virtual but more expressive and human-like in Talking agents.

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This paper reviews the first NTIRE challenge on video super-resolution (restoration of rich details in lowresolution video frames) with focus on proposed solutions and results. A new REalistic and Diverse Scenes dataset (REDS) was employed. The challenge was divided into 2 tracks. Track 1 employed standard bicubic downscaling setup while Track 2 had realistic dynamic motion blurs. Each competition had 124 and 104 registered participants. There were total 14 teams in the final testing phase. They gauge the state-of-the-art in video super-resolution.

Conventional video compression (VC) methods are based on motion compensated transform coding, and the steps of motion estimation, mode and quantization parameter selection, and entropy coding are optimized individually due to the combinatorial nature of the end-to-end optimization problem. Learned VC allows end-to-end rate-distortion (R-D) optimized training of nonlinear transform, motion and entropy model simultaneously. Most works on learned VC consider end-to-end optimization of a sequential video codec based on R-D loss averaged over pairs of successive frames. It is well-known in conventional VC that hierarchical, bi-directional coding outperforms sequential compression because of its ability to use both past and future reference frames. This paper proposes a learned hierarchical bi-directional video codec (LHBDC) that combines the benefits of hierarchical motion-compensated prediction and end-to-end optimization. Experimental results show that we achieve the best R-D results that are reported for learned VC schemes to date in both PSNR and MS-SSIM. Compared to conventional video codecs, the R-D performance of our end-to-end optimized codec outperforms those of both x265 and SVT-HEVC encoders ("veryslow" preset) in PSNR and MS-SSIM as well as HM 16.23 reference software in MS-SSIM. We present ablation studies showing performance gains due to proposed novel tools such as learned masking, flow-field subsampling, and temporal flow vector prediction. The models and instructions to reproduce our results can be found in https://github.com/makinyilmaz/LHBDC/.

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