Animated GIF optimization by adaptive color local table management

After thirty years of the GIF file format, today is becoming more popular than ever: being a great way of communication for friends and communities on Instant Messengers and Social Networks. While being so popular, the original compression method to encode GIF images have not changed a bit. On the other hand popularity means that storage saving becomes an issue for hosting platforms. In this paper a parametric optimization technique for animated GIFs will be presented. The proposed technique is based on Local Color Table selection and color remapping in order to create optimized animated GIFs while preserving the original format. The technique achieves good results in terms of byte reduction with limited or no loss of perceived color quality. Tests carried out on 1000 GIF files demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimization strategy.

A Multi-Task Learning Approach for Meal Assessment

Key role in the prevention of diet-related chronic diseases plays the balanced nutrition together with a proper diet. The conventional dietary assessment methods are time-consuming, expensive and prone to errors. New technology-based methods that provide reliable and convenient dietary assessment, have emerged during the last decade. The advances in the field of computer vision permitted the use of meal image to assess the nutrient content usually through three steps: food segmentation, recognition and volume estimation. In this paper, we propose a use one RGB meal image as input to a multi-task learning based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The proposed approach achieved outstanding performance, while a comparison with state-of-the-art methods indicated that the proposed approach exhibits clear advantage in accuracy, along with a massive reduction of processing time.