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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
The Many Moods of Emotion
This paper presents a novel approach to the facial expression generation
problem. Building upon the assumption of the psychological community that
emotion is intrinsically continuous, we first design our own continuous emotion
representation with a 3-dimensional latent space issued from a neural network
trained on discrete emotion classification. The so-obtained representation can
be used to annotate large in the wild datasets and later used to trained a
Generative Adversarial Network. We first show that our model is able to map
back to discrete emotion classes with a objectively and subjectively better
quality of the images than usual discrete approaches. But also that we are able
to pave the larger space of possible facial expressions, generating the many
moods of emotion. Moreover, two axis in this space may be found to generate
similar expression changes as in traditional continuous representations such as
arousal-valence. Finally we show from visual interpretation, that the third
remaining dimension is highly related to the well-known dominance dimension
from psychology
Optimizing Network Coding Algorithms for Multiple Applications.
Deviating from the archaic communication approach of treating information as a fluid moving through pipes, the concepts of Network Coding (NC) suggest that optimal throughput of a multicast network can be achieved by processing information at individual network nodes. However, existing challenges to harness the advantages of NC concepts for practical applications have prevented the development of NC into an effective solution to increase the performance of practical communication networks. In response, the research work presented in this thesis proposes cross-layer NC solutions to increase the network throughput of data multicast as well as video quality of video multicast applications. First, three algorithms are presented to improve the throughput of NC enabled networks by minimizing the NC coefficient vector overhead, optimizing the NC redundancy allocation and improving the robustness of NC against bursty packet losses. Considering the fact that majority of network traffic occupies video, rest of the proposed NC algorithms are content-aware and are optimized for both data and video multicast applications. A set of content and network-aware optimization algorithms, which allocate redundancies for NC considering content properties as well as the network status, are proposed to efficiently multicast data and video across content delivery networks. Furthermore content and channel-aware joint channel and network coding algorithms are proposed to efficiently multicast data and video across wireless networks. Finally, the possibilities of performing joint source and network coding are explored to increase the robustness of high volume video multicast applications. Extensive simulation studies indicate significant improvements with the proposed algorithms to increase the network throughput and video quality over related state-of-the-art solutions. Hence, it is envisaged that the proposed algorithms will contribute to the advancement of data and video multicast protocols in the future communication networks
Controllable Image-to-Video Translation: A Case Study on Facial Expression Generation
The recent advances in deep learning have made it possible to generate
photo-realistic images by using neural networks and even to extrapolate video
frames from an input video clip. In this paper, for the sake of both furthering
this exploration and our own interest in a realistic application, we study
image-to-video translation and particularly focus on the videos of facial
expressions. This problem challenges the deep neural networks by another
temporal dimension comparing to the image-to-image translation. Moreover, its
single input image fails most existing video generation methods that rely on
recurrent models. We propose a user-controllable approach so as to generate
video clips of various lengths from a single face image. The lengths and types
of the expressions are controlled by users. To this end, we design a novel
neural network architecture that can incorporate the user input into its skip
connections and propose several improvements to the adversarial training method
for the neural network. Experiments and user studies verify the effectiveness
of our approach. Especially, we would like to highlight that even for the face
images in the wild (downloaded from the Web and the authors' own photos), our
model can generate high-quality facial expression videos of which about 50\%
are labeled as real by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers.Comment: 10 page
Skeleton-aided Articulated Motion Generation
This work make the first attempt to generate articulated human motion
sequence from a single image. On the one hand, we utilize paired inputs
including human skeleton information as motion embedding and a single human
image as appearance reference, to generate novel motion frames, based on the
conditional GAN infrastructure. On the other hand, a triplet loss is employed
to pursue appearance-smoothness between consecutive frames. As the proposed
framework is capable of jointly exploiting the image appearance space and
articulated/kinematic motion space, it generates realistic articulated motion
sequence, in contrast to most previous video generation methods which yield
blurred motion effects. We test our model on two human action datasets
including KTH and Human3.6M, and the proposed framework generates very
promising results on both datasets.Comment: ACM MM 201
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