Abstract: A cellular phone and personal protective equipment usage system comprises a camera for detecting a person within an environment and a processor which receives information detected by the camera and determines whether the person is involved in distracting activities such as using a cellular phone or other portable electronic device, or print media, or is using personal protective equipment, and issues an alarm signal upon determining that the person is using a cellular phone or is not using personal protective equipment. The camera may be provided on or within a vehicle and the person is an operator of the vehicle. Alternatively, the camera may be mounted in a stationary location within a working site.

Abstract: Apparatus and methods are described for encoding and decoding image data for image blocks which form a picture by having a deblocking filter remove coding artifacts caused by local inverse tone mapping for intra-layer texture prediction for bit depth-scalability. A deblocking filter is applied at the enhancement layer for bit depth scalability. The deblocking filter is adjusted to remove coding artifacts caused by local inverse tone mapping for intra-layer texture prediction for the bit depth scalability. The boundary strength of the deblocking filter is adjusted based on a threshold that is based on a difference of inverse tone mapping parameters for the block and at least one adjacent block with respect to the block.

Abstract: An encoding apparatus includes a receiving section receiving syntax information defined by an encoding standard, a first encoding section encoding the received syntax information to generate encoded information, a transferring section transferring transmission encoded information based on the encoded information generated by the first encoding section, a second encoding section encoding reproduced encoded information reproduced from the transferred transmission encoded information, a conversion section converting the encoded information encoded by the first encoding section into redefined encoded information, to generate the transmission encoded information in accordance with the transfer capacity of the transferring section and the processing speed of encoding in each of the first encoding section and the second encoding section so as not to cause delay in encoding in the first encoding section or the second encoding section, and an inverse conversion section inversely converting the converted redefined enco