Olfaction-enhanced multimedia: Perspectives and challenges

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 Springer VerlagOlfaction—or smell—is one of the last challenges which multimedia and multimodal applications have to conquer. Enhancing such applications with olfactory stimuli has the potential to create a more complex—and richer—user multimedia experience, by heightening the sense of reality and diversifying user interaction modalities. Nonetheless, olfaction-enhanced multimedia still remains a challenging research area. More recently, however, there have been initial signs of olfactory-enhanced applications in multimedia, with olfaction being used towards a variety of goals, including notification alerts, enhancing the sense of reality in immersive applications, and branding, to name but a few. However, as the goal of a multimedia application is to inform and/or entertain users, achieving quality olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications from the users’ perspective is vital to the success and continuity of these applications. Accordingly, in this paper we have focused on investigating the user perceived experience of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications, with the aim of discovering the quality evaluation factors that are important from a user’s perspective of these applications, and consequently ensure the continued advancement and success of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications

Mitigating the impact of packet reordering to maximize performance of multimedia applications

We propose a solution to mitigate the performance degradation and corresponding Quality of Experience (QoE) reduction caused by packet reordering for multimedia applications which utilise unreliable transport protocols like the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP). We analytically derive the optimum buffer size based on the applications data rate and the maximum delay tolerated by the multimedia application. We propose a dynamically adjustable buffer in the transport protocol receiver which uses this optimum buffer size. We demonstrate, via simulation results, that our solution reduces the packet loss rate, increases the perceived bandwidth and does not increase jitter in the received applications packets while still being within the application's delay limits, therefore resulting in an increased QoE of multimedia applications

IPv6 mobility support for real-time multimedia communications: A survey

Mobile Internet protocol version 6(MIPv6) route optimization improves triangular routing problem that exists in MIPv4 environment.Route optimization of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) over MIPv6 provides ef�cient real-time multimedia applications to users. This article provides a survey of SIP over MIPv6. We review the processes involved during the setting up of a SIP call and during mid-call SIP mobility. When SIP transmits real-time multimedia applications in a wireless environment, the mobile node (MN) may move from one access router (AR) to another AR, handing over control from one AR to the other. High handover latency degrades the quality of real-time multimedia applications due to the fact that real-time multimedia applications are delay-sensitive.Handover latency is an important issue to discuss.Reduction of handover latency can be made possible with the use of SIP's hierarchical registration. On the other hand, hybrid hierarchical and fast handover SIP's registration performs better compared to hierarchical registration. Finally, we present the directions for future research

Communication systems supporting multimedia multi-user applications

Multimedia multi-user applications are becoming more and more important. Intensive research is underway on the design of protocols and protocol entities for future communication systems supporting multimedia multi-user applications. The development of a service description ensures that protocol designs actually produce the required functional behavior. The authors explain the approach to the description of a multimedia multi-user service. An example illustrates the use of the service description in the design of communication systems. Next, they present the basic requirements of multimedia and multi-user communications. A call model underlies and structures the service description. Finally, the authors describe the service in terms of service element

Exploiting a new level of DLP in multimedia applications

This paper proposes and evaluates MOM: a novel ISA paradigm targeted at multimedia applications. By fusing conventional vector ISA approaches together with more recent SIMD-like (Single Instruction Multiple Data) ISAs (such as MMX), we have developed a new matrix oriented ISA which efficiently deals with the small matrix structures typically found in multimedia applications. MOM exploits a level of DLP not reachable by neither conventional vector ISAs nor SIMD-like media ISA extensions. Our results show that MOM provides a factor of 1.3x to 4x performance improvement when compared with two different multimedia extensions (MMX and MDMX) on several kernels, which translates into up to a 50% of performance gain when measuring full applications (20% in average). Furthermore, the streaming nature of MOM provides additional advantages for executing multimedia applications, such as a very low fetch pressure or a high tolerance to memory latency, making MOM an ideal candidate for the embedded domain.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A Utility-based QoS Model for Emerging Multimedia Applications

Existing network QoS models do not sufficiently reflect the challenges faced by high-throughput, always-on, inelastic multimedia applications. In this paper, a utility-based QoS model is proposed as a user layer extension to existing communication QoS models to better assess the requirements of multimedia applications and manage the QoS provisioning of multimedia flows. Network impairment utility functions are derived from user experiments and combined to application utility functions to evaluate the application quality. Simulation is used to demonstrate the validity of the proposed QoS model

Information extraction from multimedia web documents: an open-source platform and testbed

The LivingKnowledge project aimed to enhance the current state of the art in search, retrieval and knowledge management on the web by advancing the use of sentiment and opinion analysis within multimedia applications. To achieve this aim, a diverse set of novel and complementary analysis techniques have been integrated into a single, but extensible software platform on which such applications can be built. The platform combines state-of-the-art techniques for extracting facts, opinions and sentiment from multimedia documents, and unlike earlier platforms, it exploits both visual and textual techniques to support multimedia information retrieval. Foreseeing the usefulness of this software in the wider community, the platform has been made generally available as an open-source project. This paper describes the platform design, gives an overview of the analysis algorithms integrated into the system and describes two applications that utilise the system for multimedia information retrieval

Implementation of QoS onto virtual bus network

Quality of Service (QoS) is a key issue in a multimedia environment because multimedia applications are sensitive to delay. The virtual bus architecture is a hierarchical access network structure that has been proposed to simplify network signaling. The network employs an interconnection of hierarchical database to support advanced routing of the signaling and traffic load. Therefore, the requirements and management of quality of service is important in the virtual bus network particularly to support multimedia applications. QoS and traffic parameters are specified for each class type and the OMNeT model has been described

Stars in their eyes: What eye-tracking reveal about multimedia perceptual quality

Perceptual multimedia quality is of paramount importance to the continued take-up and proliferation of multimedia applications: users will not use and pay for applications if they are perceived to be of low quality. Whilst traditionally distributed multimedia quality has been characterised by Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, these neglect the user perspective of the issue of quality. In order to redress this shortcoming, we characterise the user multimedia perspective using the Quality of Perception (QoP) metric, which encompasses not only a user’s satisfaction with the quality of a multimedia presentation, but also his/her ability to analyse, synthesise and assimilate informational content of multimedia. In recognition of the fact that monitoring eye movements offers insights into visual perception, as well as the associated attention mechanisms and cognitive processes, this paper reports on the results of a study investigating the impact of differing multimedia presentation frame rates on user QoP and eye path data. Our results show that provision of higher frame rates, usually assumed to provide better multimedia presentation quality, do not significantly impact upon the median coordinate value of eye path data. Moreover, higher frame rates do not significantly increase level of participant information assimilation, although they do significantly improve overall user enjoyment and quality perception of the multimedia content being shown