A Turbo-Detection Aided Serially Concatenated MPEG-4/TCM Videophone Transceiver

A Turbo-detection aided serially concatenated inner Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM) scheme is combined with four different outer codes, namely with a Reversible Variable Length Code (RVLC), a Non-Systematic Convolutional (NSC) code a Recursive Systematic Convolutional (RSC) code or a Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code. These four outer constituent codes are comparatively studied in the context of an MPEG4 videophone transceiver. These serially concatenated schemes are also compared to a stand-alone LDPC coded MPEG4 videophone system at the same effective overall coding rate. The performance of the proposed schemes is evaluated when communicating over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels. It was found that the serially concatenated TCM-NSC scheme was the most attractive one in terms of coding gain and decoding complexity among all the schemes considered in the context of the MPEG4 videophone transceiver. By contrast, the serially concatenated TCM-RSC scheme was found to attain the highest iteration gain among the schemes considered

Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients

Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4-6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE

Help I'm surrounded

A dimly lit auditorium, the smell of popcorn and hot-dogs accompanied by the sound of fizzy drinks slurped through straws; the lights dim and a hush of expectation descends, sound fades in from all around, drawing the audience into the illusion of another reality. This is the world of the cinema, but is it possible to recreate this cinematic surround sound experience in the home? In order to address this question it is necessary to understand what is meant by "cinematic" surround sound and to consider some of the challenges faced by those seeking to translate it to the home environment. This article examines these issues through an exploration of the development of surround sound in the cinema and its transference to the home and concludes with a tentative look towards possible future developments