Abstract: Disclosed is a method for modifying starch to slow down the digestion rate of modified starch. The present invention utilizes two-stage GBE treatment to convert the long straight-chain starch molecules into highly branched molecules with compact structures so as to decrease the digestion rate of the starch. During the two-stage treatment, granular starch was first treated with GBE, the treated starch was gelatinized in boiling water, and the gelatinized starch was treated with GBE for a second time, leading to an enhanced effect of GBE modification. Compared with the one-staged GBE modification, the two-stage GBE modification can further increase the content of slowly digestible starch in the modified starch and thus decrease the digestion rate of starch.

Abstract: Disclosed is a method for modifying starch to slow down the digestion rate of modified starch. The present invention utilizes two-stage GBE treatment to convert the long straight-chain starch molecules into highly branched molecules with compact structures so as to decrease the digestion rate of the starch. During the two-stage treatment, granular starch was first treated with GBE, the treated starch was gelatinized in boiling water, and the gelatinized starch was treated with GBE for a second time, leading to an enhanced effect of GBE modification. Compared with the one-staged GBE modification, the two-stage GBE modification can further increase the content of slowly digestible starch in the modified starch and thus decrease the digestion rate of starch.

Abstract: The present embodiments include methods, systems, and apparatuses for foreground biased depth map refinement in which horizontal gradient of the texture edge in color image is used to guide the shifting of the foreground depth pixels around the large depth discontinuities in order to make the whole texture edge pixels assigned with foreground depth values. In such an embodiment, only background information may be used in hole-filling process. Such embodiments may significantly improve the quality of the synthesized view by avoiding incorrect use of foreground texture information in hole-filling. Additionally, the depth map quality may not be significantly degraded when such methods are used for hole-filling.

Abstract: A depth map image, unlike a texture view, has smooth regions without complex texture and abrupt changes of pixel value at the object edges. While conventional Inter-prediction skip mode is very efficient for coding texture views, it does not include any Intra-prediction capability, which can be very efficient for coding smooth regions. The hybrid prediction skip mode according to the presently claimed invention includes an Inter-prediction Skip mode coupled with various Intra-prediction modes. The selection of the prediction mode is made by computing a Side Match Distortion (SMD) for the prediction modes. Because no additional overhead indicator bit is required and that the bitstream syntax is not altered, high coding efficiency is maintained and the coding scheme for coding depth maps in accordance to the presently disclosed invention can be implemented easily as an extension to existing standards.