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

Machine Learning for Multimedia Communications

Machine learning is revolutionizing the way multimedia information is processed and transmitted to users. After intensive and powerful training, some impressive efficiency/accuracy improvements have been made all over the transmission pipeline. For example, the high model capacity of the learning-based architectures enables us to accurately model the image and video behavior such that tremendous compression gains can be achieved. Similarly, error concealment, streaming strategy or even user perception modeling have widely benefited from the recent learningoriented developments. However, learning-based algorithms often imply drastic changes to the way data are represented or consumed, meaning that the overall pipeline can be affected even though a subpart of it is optimized. In this paper, we review the recent major advances that have been proposed all across the transmission chain, and we discuss their potential impact and the research challenges that they raise

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Avaliação da qualidade de experiência de vídeo em várias tecnologias

Mestrado em Engenharia Eletrónica e TelecomunicaçõesNowadays the internet is associated with many services. Combined with this fact, there is a marked increase of the users joining this service. In this perspective, it is required that the service providers guarantee a minimum quality to the network services. The Quality of Experience of services is quite crucial in the development of services in networks. Also noteworthy, the tra c increase in multimedia services, including video streaming, increases the probability of congesting the networks. In the perspective of the service provider, the monitoring is a solution to avoid saturation in network. This way, this dissertation proposes to develop a platform that allows a multimedia tra c monitoring in the Meo Go service provided by the operator Portugal Telecom Communications. The architecture of the adaptive streaming over HTTP has been studied and tested to obtain the quality of experience metrics. This adaptive streaming technique presents the smooth streaming, an architecture made by Microsoft company, and it is used in the Meo Go service. Then, it is monitored the metrics obtained with the video player. This analysis is done objectively and subjectively. In this phase, the objective implementation of the method allows to obtain the prediction value of the Quality of Experience by consumers. The selected metrics were derived from the state / performance of network and terminal device. The obtained metrics aim to simulate human action in video score quality. Otherwise, subjectively, it is conducted a survey based in a questionnaire to compare methods. In this phase it was created an on-line platform to allow the obtain a greater number of rankings and data processing. In the obtained results, rstly in the smooth streaming player, it is shown the adaptive streaming implementation technique. On the next phase, test scenarios were created to demonstrate the functioning of the method in many cases, with greater relevance for those ones with higher dynamic complexity. From the perspective of subjective and objective methods, these have values that con rm the architecture of the implemented module. Over time, the performance of the scoring the quality of video streaming services approaches the one in a human mental action.Nos dias de hoje a Internet é um dos meios com mais serviços associados. Conjugado a este facto, existe um acentuado aumento de utilizadores a aderir a este serviço. Nesta perspectiva existe a necessidade de garantir uma qualidade mínima por parte dos prestadores de serviços. A Qualidade de Experiência que os consumidores têm dos serviços é bastante crucial no desenvolvimento e optimização dos serviços nas redes. É ainda de salientar que o aumento do tráfego multimédia, nomeadamente os streamings de vídeo, apresenta incrementos na probabilidade de as redes se congestionarem. Na perspectiva do prestador de serviços a monitorização é a solução para evitar a saturação total. Neste sentido, esta dissertação pretende desenvolver uma plataforma que permite a monitorização do tráfego de multimédia do serviço do Meo Go, fornecido pela operadora Portugal Telecom Comunicações. Neste trabalho foi necessário investigar e testar a arquitectura do streaming adaptativo sobre HTTP para ser possível obter métricas de qualidade de experiência. Este streaming adaptativo apresenta a técnica de smooth streaming, sendo esta arquitectura projectada pela empresa Microsoft e utilizada no serviço Meo Go. Posteriormente foram monitorizadas as métricas que se obtiveram no player de vídeo. Esta análise foi realizada de forma objectiva e subjectiva. Nesta fase da implementação objectiva do método em que se pretende obter uma predição do valor de Qualidade de Experiência por parte do consumidor, foram seleccionadas as métricas oriundas do estado/desempenho da rede e do dispositivo terminal. As métricas obtidas entram num processo de tratamento que pretende simular a ação humana nas classificações da qualidade dos vídeos. De outra forma, subjectivamente, foi realizada uma pesquisa, com base num questionário, de modo a comparar os métodos. Nesta etapa foi gerada uma plataforma online que possibilitou obter um maior número de classificações dos vídeos para posteriormente se proceder ao tratamento de dados. Nos resultados obtidos, primeiramente ao nível do player de smooth streaming, estes permitem analisar a técnica de implementação de streaming adaptativo. Numa fase seguinte foram criados cenários de teste para comprovar o funcionamento do método em diversas situações, tendo com maior relevância aqueles que contêm dinâmicas mais complexas. Na perspectiva dos métodos subjectivo e objectivo, estes apresentam valores que confirmam a arquitectura do módulo implementado. Adicionalmente, o desempenho do método em classificar a qualidade de serviço de vídeo streaming, ao longo do tempo, apresentou valores que se aproximam da dinâmica esperada numa ação mental humana

3D multiple description coding for error resilience over wireless networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Mobile communications has gained a growing interest from both customers and service providers alike in the last 1-2 decades. Visual information is used in many application domains such as remote health care, video –on demand, broadcasting, video surveillance etc. In order to enhance the visual effects of digital video content, the depth perception needs to be provided with the actual visual content. 3D video has earned a significant interest from the research community in recent years, due to the tremendous impact it leaves on viewers and its enhancement of the user’s quality of experience (QoE). In the near future, 3D video is likely to be used in most video applications, as it offers a greater sense of immersion and perceptual experience. When 3D video is compressed and transmitted over error prone channels, the associated packet loss leads to visual quality degradation. When a picture is lost or corrupted so severely that the concealment result is not acceptable, the receiver typically pauses video playback and waits for the next INTRA picture to resume decoding. Error propagation caused by employing predictive coding may degrade the video quality severely. There are several ways used to mitigate the effects of such transmission errors. One widely used technique in International Video Coding Standards is error resilience. The motivation behind this research work is that, existing schemes for 2D colour video compression such as MPEG, JPEG and H.263 cannot be applied to 3D video content. 3D video signals contain depth as well as colour information and are bandwidth demanding, as they require the transmission of multiple high-bandwidth 3D video streams. On the other hand, the capacity of wireless channels is limited and wireless links are prone to various types of errors caused by noise, interference, fading, handoff, error burst and network congestion. Given the maximum bit rate budget to represent the 3D scene, optimal bit-rate allocation between texture and depth information rendering distortion/losses should be minimised. To mitigate the effect of these errors on the perceptual 3D video quality, error resilience video coding needs to be investigated further to offer better quality of experience (QoE) to end users. This research work aims at enhancing the error resilience capability of compressed 3D video, when transmitted over mobile channels, using Multiple Description Coding (MDC) in order to improve better user’s quality of experience (QoE). Furthermore, this thesis examines the sensitivity of the human visual system (HVS) when employed to view 3D video scenes. The approach used in this study is to use subjective testing in order to rate people’s perception of 3D video under error free and error prone conditions through the use of a carefully designed bespoke questionnaire.Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF

Smart PIN: performance and cost-oriented context-aware personal information network

The next generation of networks will involve interconnection of heterogeneous individual networks such as WPAN, WLAN, WMAN and Cellular network, adopting the IP as common infrastructural protocol and providing virtually always-connected network. Furthermore, there are many devices which enable easy acquisition and storage of information as pictures, movies, emails, etc. Therefore, the information overload and divergent content’s characteristics make it difficult for users to handle their data in manual way. Consequently, there is a need for personalised automatic services which would enable data exchange across heterogeneous network and devices. To support these personalised services, user centric approaches for data delivery across the heterogeneous network are also required. In this context, this thesis proposes Smart PIN - a novel performance and cost-oriented context-aware Personal Information Network. Smart PIN's architecture is detailed including its network, service and management components. Within the service component, two novel schemes for efficient delivery of context and content data are proposed: Multimedia Data Replication Scheme (MDRS) and Quality-oriented Algorithm for Multiple-source Multimedia Delivery (QAMMD). MDRS supports efficient data accessibility among distributed devices using data replication which is based on a utility function and a minimum data set. QAMMD employs a buffer underflow avoidance scheme for streaming, which achieves high multimedia quality without content adaptation to network conditions. Simulation models for MDRS and QAMMD were built which are based on various heterogeneous network scenarios. Additionally a multiple-source streaming based on QAMMS was implemented as a prototype and tested in an emulated network environment. Comparative tests show that MDRS and QAMMD perform significantly better than other approaches

Designing Human-Centered Collective Intelligence

Human-Centered Collective Intelligence (HCCI) is an emergent research area that seeks to bring together major research areas like machine learning, statistical modeling, information retrieval, market research, and software engineering to address challenges pertaining to deriving intelligent insights and solutions through the collaboration of several intelligent sensors, devices and data sources. An archetypal contextual CI scenario might be concerned with deriving affect-driven intelligence through multimodal emotion detection sources in a bid to determine the likability of one movie trailer over another. On the other hand, the key tenets to designing robust and evolutionary software and infrastructure architecture models to address cross-cutting quality concerns is of keen interest in the “Cloud” age of today. Some of the key quality concerns of interest in CI scenarios span the gamut of security and privacy, scalability, performance, fault-tolerance, and reliability. I present recent advances in CI system design with a focus on highlighting optimal solutions for the aforementioned cross-cutting concerns. I also describe a number of design challenges and a framework that I have determined to be critical to designing CI systems. With inspiration from machine learning, computational advertising, ubiquitous computing, and sociable robotics, this literature incorporates theories and concepts from various viewpoints to empower the collective intelligence engine, ZOEI, to discover affective state and emotional intent across multiple mediums. The discerned affective state is used in recommender systems among others to support content personalization. I dive into the design of optimal architectures that allow humans and intelligent systems to work collectively to solve complex problems. I present an evaluation of various studies that leverage the ZOEI framework to design collective intelligence

Performance evaluation of information and communications technology infrastructure for smart distribution network applications

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Current electrical networks require secure, scalable and cost-effective Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions to facilitate the novel functionalities required by Smart Grids. Countries around the globe are investigating alternative energy sources to mitigate the current energy crisis and environmental issues experienced by many countries due to global warming, rapid growth of population, inefficient energy management, dwindling fossil fuel resources, etc. Therefore, alternative or renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, hydro, combined heat and power, etc., are required to mitigate such a crisis and such sources will also need to be integrated in to the power grid in a distributed manner. Such distributed energy sources are mainly connected to the distribution networks and introduce huge challenges to the distribution network operator (DNO). Many of these challenges cannot be dealt with effectively using existing network operation mechanisms therefore the research and development of novel ICT solutions to support smart distribution network operation is required. This research investigated suitable ICT solutions to enable the Smart Grid to tackle these challenges and proposes ICT infrastructure models that can be used for simulation studies in order to investigate cost-effective, scalable and secure solutions for the DNOs. Initially, a Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring test-bed was proposed to evaluate the performance of bandwidth intensive applications, such as smart meter data transmission. Simulation studies for different communication technologies, cellular and Power Line Communication (PLC), were also carried out and the simulation models were verified using experimental test results. Finally, the modelling and analysis of smart metering infrastructure was carried out using simulation and extensive studies were performed to evaluate the data transmission rate performance for different configurations of smart meters and concentrators