Image processing for multimedia terminals and related architectures

The multimedia terminals of tomorrow are seen today as toolboxes containing flexible solutions not only able to compress audio-visual flows, but also to interact with the contents, provide tools for copyright protection, adapt the signal representations to the communication channels, etc. The aim of this paper is to overview a flexible architecture suited for dynamically downloadable environments, discuss briefly new functionalities demanded for image communications and present more deeply a system globally optimized for noisy channels. The description of these three items illustrates the needs for image processing research to integrate in a global approach the communication software design, the new functionalities, among which security and copyright protection are of major importance, and to globally optimize the different codings, e.g. source and channel codings. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved