Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

End-to-end 3D video communication over heterogeneous networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Three-dimensional technology, more commonly referred to as 3D technology, has revolutionised many fields including entertainment, medicine, and communications to name a few. In addition to 3D films, games, and sports channels, 3D perception has made tele-medicine a reality. By the year 2015, 30% of the all HD panels at home will be 3D enabled, predicted by consumer electronics manufacturers. Stereoscopic cameras, a comparatively mature technology compared to other 3D systems, are now being used by ordinary citizens to produce 3D content and share at a click of a button just like they do with the 2D counterparts via sites like YouTube. But technical challenges still exist, including with autostereoscopic multiview displays. 3D content requires many complex considerations--including how to represent it, and deciphering what is the best compression format--when considering transmission or storage, because of its increased amount of data. Any decision must be taken in the light of the available bandwidth or storage capacity, quality and user expectations. Free viewpoint navigation also remains partly unsolved. The most pressing issue getting in the way of widespread uptake of consumer 3D systems is the ability to deliver 3D content to heterogeneous consumer displays over the heterogeneous networks. Optimising 3D video communication solutions must consider the entire pipeline, starting with optimisation at the video source to the end display and transmission optimisation. Multi-view offers the most compelling solution for 3D videos with motion parallax and freedom from wearing headgear for 3D video perception. Optimising multi-view video for delivery and display could increase the demand for true 3D in the consumer market. This thesis focuses on an end-to-end quality optimisation in 3D video communication/transmission, offering solutions for optimisation at the compression, transmission, and decoder levels.Brunel University - Isambard Research Scholarshi

MediaSync: Handbook on Multimedia Synchronization

This book provides an approachable overview of the most recent advances in the fascinating field of media synchronization (mediasync), gathering contributions from the most representative and influential experts. Understanding the challenges of this field in the current multi-sensory, multi-device, and multi-protocol world is not an easy task. The book revisits the foundations of mediasync, including theoretical frameworks and models, highlights ongoing research efforts, like hybrid broadband broadcast (HBB) delivery and users' perception modeling (i.e., Quality of Experience or QoE), and paves the way for the future (e.g., towards the deployment of multi-sensory and ultra-realistic experiences). Although many advances around mediasync have been devised and deployed, this area of research is getting renewed attention to overcome remaining challenges in the next-generation (heterogeneous and ubiquitous) media ecosystem. Given the significant advances in this research area, its current relevance and the multiple disciplines it involves, the availability of a reference book on mediasync becomes necessary. This book fills the gap in this context. In particular, it addresses key aspects and reviews the most relevant contributions within the mediasync research space, from different perspectives. Mediasync: Handbook on Multimedia Synchronization is the perfect companion for scholars and practitioners that want to acquire strong knowledge about this research area, and also approach the challenges behind ensuring the best mediated experiences, by providing the adequate synchronization between the media elements that constitute these experiences

Media gateway utilizando um GPU

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic

Robust density modelling using the student's t-distribution for human action recognition

The extraction of human features from videos is often inaccurate and prone to outliers. Such outliers can severely affect density modelling when the Gaussian distribution is used as the model since it is highly sensitive to outliers. The Gaussian distribution is also often used as base component of graphical models for recognising human actions in the videos (hidden Markov model and others) and the presence of outliers can significantly affect the recognition accuracy. In contrast, the Student's t-distribution is more robust to outliers and can be exploited to improve the recognition rate in the presence of abnormal data. In this paper, we present an HMM which uses mixtures of t-distributions as observation probabilities and show how experiments over two well-known datasets (Weizmann, MuHAVi) reported a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy. © 2011 IEEE

Object Duplicate Detection

With the technological evolution of digital acquisition and storage technologies, millions of images and video sequences are captured every day and shared in online services. One way of exploring this huge volume of images and videos is through searching a particular object depicted in images or videos by making use of object duplicate detection. Therefore, need of research on object duplicate detection is validated by several image and video retrieval applications, such as tag propagation, augmented reality, surveillance, mobile visual search, and television statistic measurement. Object duplicate detection is detecting visually same or very similar object to a query. Input is not restricted to an image, it can be several images from an object or even it can be a video. This dissertation describes the author's contribution to solve problems on object duplicate detection in computer vision. A novel graph-based approach is introduced for 2D and 3D object duplicate detection in still images. Graph model is used to represent the 3D spatial information of the object based on the local features extracted from training images so that an explicit and complex 3D object modeling is avoided. Therefore, improved performance can be achieved in comparison to existing methods in terms of both robustness and computational complexity. Our method is shown to be robust in detecting the same objects even when images containing the objects are taken from very different viewpoints or distances. Furthermore, we apply our object duplicate detection method to video, where the training images are added iteratively to the video sequence in order to compensate for 3D view variations, illumination changes and partial occlusions. Finally, we show several mobile applications for object duplicate detection, such as object recognition based museum guide, money recognition or flower recognition. General object duplicate detection may fail to detection chess figures, however considering context, like chess board position and height of the chess figure, detection can be more accurate. We show that user interaction further improves image retrieval compared to pure content-based methods through a game, called Epitome

Radio Resource Management Optimization For Next Generation Wireless Networks

The prominent versatility of today’s mobile broadband services and the rapid advancements in the cellular phones industry have led to a tremendous expansion in the wireless market volume. Despite the continuous progress in the radio-access technologies to cope with that expansion, many challenges still remain that need to be addressed by both the research and industrial sectors. One of the many remaining challenges is the efficient allocation and management of wireless network resources when using the latest cellular radio technologies (e.g., 4G). The importance of the problem stems from the scarcity of the wireless spectral resources, the large number of users sharing these resources, the dynamic behavior of generated traffic, and the stochastic nature of wireless channels. These limitations are further tightened as the provider’s commitment to high quality-of-service (QoS) levels especially data rate, delay and delay jitter besides the system’s spectral and energy efficiencies. In this dissertation, we strive to solve this problem by presenting novel cross-layer resource allocation schemes to address the efficient utilization of available resources versus QoS challenges using various optimization techniques. The main objective of this dissertation is to propose a new predictive resource allocation methodology using an agile ray tracing (RT) channel prediction approach. It is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the theoretical and implementational aspects of the ray tracing prediction model, and its validation. In the second part, a novel RT-based scheduling system within the evolving cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture is proposed. The impact of the proposed model on addressing the long term evolution (LTE) network limitations is then rigorously investigated in the form of optimization problems. The main contributions of this dissertation encompass the design of several heuristic solutions based on our novel RT-based scheduling model, developed to meet the aforementioned objectives while considering the co-existing limitations in the context of LTE networks. Both analytical and numerical methods are used within this thesis framework. Theoretical results are validated with numerical simulations. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions to meet the objectives subject to limitations and constraints compared to other published works

Etude et mise en place d’une plateforme d’adaptation multiservice embarquée pour la gestion de flux multimédia à différents niveaux logiciels et matériels

On the one hand, technology advances have led to the expansion of the handheld devices market. Thanks to this expansion, people are more and more connected and more and more data are exchanged over the Internet. On the other hand, this huge amound of data imposes drastic constrains in order to achieve sufficient quality. The Internet is now showing its limits to assure such quality. To answer nowadays limitations, a next generation Internet is envisioned. This new network takes into account the content nature (video, audio, ...) and the context (network state, terminal capabilities ...) to better manage its own resources. To this extend, video manipulation is one of the key concept that is highlighted in this arising context. Video content is more and more consumed and at the same time requires more and more resources. Adapting videos to the network state (reducing its bitrate to match available bandwidth) or to the terminal capabilities (screen size, supported codecs, …) appears mandatory and is foreseen to take place in real time in networking devices such as home gateways. However, video adaptation is a resource intensive task and must be implemented using hardware accelerators to meet the desired low cost and real time constraints.In this thesis, content- and context-awareness is first analyzed to be considered at the network side. Secondly, a generic low cost video adaptation system is proposed and compared to existing solutions as a trade-off between system complexity and quality. Then, hardware conception is tackled as this system is implemented in an FPGA based architecture. Finally, this system is used to evaluate the indirect effects of video adaptation; energy consumption reduction is achieved at the terminal side by reducing video characteristics thus permitting an increased user experience for End-Users.Les avancées technologiques ont permis la commercialisation à grande échelle de terminaux mobiles. De ce fait, l’homme est de plus en plus connecté et partout. Ce nombre grandissant d’usagers du réseau ainsi que la forte croissance du contenu disponible, aussi bien d’un point de vue quantitatif que qualitatif saturent les réseaux et l’augmentation des moyens matériels (passage à la fibre optique) ne suffisent pas. Pour surmonter cela, les réseaux doivent prendre en compte le type de contenu (texte, vidéo, ...) ainsi que le contexte d’utilisation (état du réseau, capacité du terminal, ...) pour assurer une qualité d’expérience optimum. A ce sujet, la vidéo fait partie des contenus les plus critiques. Ce type de contenu est non seulement de plus en plus consommé par les utilisateurs mais est aussi l’un des plus contraignant en terme de ressources nécéssaires à sa distribution (taille serveur, bande passante, …). Adapter un contenu vidéo en fonction de l’état du réseau (ajuster son débit binaire à la bande passante) ou des capacités du terminal (s’assurer que le codec soit nativement supporté) est indispensable. Néanmoins, l’adaptation vidéo est un processus qui nécéssite beaucoup de ressources. Cela est antinomique à son utilisation à grande echelle dans les appareils à bas coûts qui constituent aujourd’hui une grande part dans l’ossature du réseau Internet. Cette thèse se concentre sur la conception d’un système d’adaptation vidéo à bas coût et temps réel qui prendrait place dans ces réseaux du futur. Après une analyse du contexte, un système d’adaptation générique est proposé et évalué en comparaison de l’état de l’art. Ce système est implémenté sur un FPGA afin d’assurer les performances (temps-réels) et la nécessité d’une solution à bas coût. Enfin, une étude sur les effets indirects de l’adaptation vidéo est menée

Etude et mise en place d'une plateforme d'adaptation multiservice embarquée pour la gestion de flux multimédia à différents niveaux logiciels et matériels

Les avancées technologiques ont permis la commercialisation à grande échelle de terminaux mobiles. De ce fait, l homme est de plus en plus connecté et partout. Ce nombre grandissant d usagers du réseau ainsi que la forte croissance du contenu disponible, aussi bien d un point de vue quantitatif que qualitatif saturent les réseaux et l augmentation des moyens matériels (passage à la fibre optique) ne suffisent pas. Pour surmonter cela, les réseaux doivent prendre en compte le type de contenu (texte, vidéo, ...) ainsi que le contexte d utilisation (état du réseau, capacité du terminal, ...) pour assurer une qualité d expérience optimum. A ce sujet, la vidéo fait partie des contenus les plus critiques. Ce type de contenu est non seulement de plus en plus consommé par les utilisateurs mais est aussi l un des plus contraignant en terme de ressources nécéssaires à sa distribution (taille serveur, bande passante, ). Adapter un contenu vidéo en fonction de l état du réseau (ajuster son débit binaire à la bande passante) ou des capacités du terminal (s assurer que le codec soit nativement supporté) est indispensable. Néanmoins, l adaptation vidéo est un processus qui nécéssite beaucoup de ressources. Cela est antinomique à son utilisation à grande echelle dans les appareils à bas coûts qui constituent aujourd hui une grande part dans l ossature du réseau Internet. Cette thèse se concentre sur la conception d un système d adaptation vidéo à bas coût et temps réel qui prendrait place dans ces réseaux du futur. Après une analyse du contexte, un système d adaptation générique est proposé et évalué en comparaison de l état de l art. Ce système est implémenté sur un FPGA afin d assurer les performances (temps-réels) et la nécessité d une solution à bas coût. Enfin, une étude sur les effets indirects de l adaptation vidéo est menée.On the one hand, technology advances have led to the expansion of the handheld devices market. Thanks to this expansion, people are more and more connected and more and more data are exchanged over the Internet. On the other hand, this huge amound of data imposes drastic constrains in order to achieve sufficient quality. The Internet is now showing its limits to assure such quality. To answer nowadays limitations, a next generation Internet is envisioned. This new network takes into account the content nature (video, audio, ...) and the context (network state, terminal capabilities ...) to better manage its own resources. To this extend, video manipulation is one of the key concept that is highlighted in this arising context. Video content is more and more consumed and at the same time requires more and more resources. Adapting videos to the network state (reducing its bitrate to match available bandwidth) or to the terminal capabilities (screen size, supported codecs, ) appears mandatory and is foreseen to take place in real time in networking devices such as home gateways. However, video adaptation is a resource intensive task and must be implemented using hardware accelerators to meet the desired low cost and real time constraints.In this thesis, content- and context-awareness is first analyzed to be considered at the network side. Secondly, a generic low cost video adaptation system is proposed and compared to existing solutions as a trade-off between system complexity and quality. Then, hardware conception is tackled as this system is implemented in an FPGA based architecture. Finally, this system is used to evaluate the indirect effects of video adaptation; energy consumption reduction is achieved at the terminal side by reducing video characteristics thus permitting an increased user experience for End-Users.BORDEAUX1-Bib.electronique (335229901) / SudocSudocFranceF