An interactive video streaming architecture for H.264/AVC compliant players

In this paper, we describe an interactive streaming architecture. The content streamed by this architecture is encoded with the H.264/AVC standard for video compression. The architecture has three key functionalities: temporal juxtaposition of multiple video bitstreams in a unique streaming session, on the fly image bitstreams composition and user feedback interpretation. These functionalities rely mainly on H.264/AVC features, thus allowing any basic H.264/AVC compliant player to use them.Anglai

A rendezvous point selection algorithm for videoconferencing applications

Many new multimedia group applications rely on the selection of a rendezvous point on a network at which to hold the meeting. Each participant sends his multimedia data stream through forward paths to this central node, which then broadcasts a virtual videoconference scene through a multicast backward path towards all the participants. We model the optimization of these paths as the shortest path problem and the optimal Steiner tree problem. We propose a heuristic to select a rendezvous point minimizing a weighted sum of forward and backward paths. Computational results are presented showing the performance of our approach.Anglai

Human visual system features enabling watermarking

Digital watermarking consists of hiding subliminal information into digital media content, also called host data. It can be the basis of many applications, including security and media asset management. In this paper, we focus on the imperceptibility requirement for image watermarking. We present the main features of the human visual system (HVS) to be translated into watermarking technology. This paper highlights the need for dedicated inputs from the human vision community. The human visual system (HVS) is very complex and able to deal with a huge amount of information. Roughly speaking, it is composed of a receiver with a pre-processing stage, the eye and the retina, a transmission channel, the optic nerve, and a processing engine, the visual cortex. Mainly because of our lack of knowledge about brain behavior, i.e. about the way a stimulus is processed through its huge neural network, the large effort to understand and model the HVS behavior has partly remained fruitless. The aim of this paper is not to provide a thorough description of the HVS. For complete HVS models and more specific details, the reader is referred to existing literature. Here, we only try to understand, in a synthetic way and from an engineering perspective, the HVS features on which the designer of a watermarking algorithm can rely, i.e. its sensitivity and masking capabilities.Anglai