Multimedia Communication

That was Multimedia Modeling 2012...

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:36:00 +0000

MPEG news: a report from the 98th meeting, Geneva, Switzerland

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:49:00 +0000

#MPEG98 report: DASH=IS ✔ CDVS=CfP eval ✔ {MMT, HEVC, 3DAudio}=MPEG-H ✔ IVC={IVC, WebVC} ✔ 3DVC=CfP eval ✔

... MPEG news from its 98th meeting in Geneva, Switzerland with less than 140 characters and a lot of acronyms. The official press release is, as usual, here. As you can see from the press release, MPEG produced significant results, namely:

MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) ratified
3D Video Coding: Evaluation of responses to Call for Proposals
MPEG royalty free video coding: Internet Video Coding (IVC) + Web Video Coding (WebVC)
High Efficiency Coding and Media Delivery in Heterogeneous Environments: MPEG-H comprising MMT, HEVC, 3DAC
Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (CDVS): Evaluation of responses to the Call for Proposals
Call for requirements: Multimedia Preservation Description Information (MPDI)
MPEG Augmented Reality (AR)

As you can see, a long list of achievements within a single meeting but let's dig inside. For each topic I've also tried to provide some research issues which I think are worth to investigate both inside and outside MPEG.

MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH): DASH=IS ✔

As the official press release states, the MPEG ratifies its draft standard for DASH and it comes better, the standard should become publicly available which I expect to happen somewhat early next year, approx. March 2012, or maybe earlier. I say "should" because there is no guarantee that this will actually happen but signs are good. In the meantime, feel free using our software to play around and we expect to update it to the latest version of the standard as soon as possible. Finally, IEEE Computer Society Computing Now has put together a theme on Video for the Universal Web featuring DASH.

Research issues: performance, bandwidth estimation, request scheduling (aka adaptation logic), and Quality of Service/Experience.

3D Video Coding: 3DVC=CfP eval ✔

MPEG evaluated more than 20 proposals submitted as a response to the call issued back in April 2011. The evaluation of the proposal comprised subjective quality assessments conducted by 13 highly qualified test laboratories distributed around the world and coordinated by the COST Action IC1003 QUALINET. The report of the subjective test results from the call for proposals on 3D video coding will be available by end of this week. MPEG documented the standardization tracks considered in 3DVC (i.e., compatible with MVC, AVC base-view, HEVC, ...) and agreed on a common software based on the best-performing proposals.

Research issues: encoding efficiency of 3D depth maps and compatibility for the various target formats (AVC, MVC, HEVC) as well as depth map estimation at the client side.

MPEG royalty free video coding: IVC vs. WebVC

In addition to the evaluation of the responses to the call for 3DVC, MPEG also evaluated the responses to the Internet Video Coding call. Based on the responses, MPEG decided to follow up with two approaches namely Internet Video Coding (IVC) and Web Video Coding (WebVC). The former - IVC - is based on MPEG-1 technology which is assumed to be royalty-free. However, it requires some performance boosts in order to make it ready for the Internet. MPEG's approach is a common platform called Internet video coding Test Model (ITM) which serves as the basis for further improvements. The latter - WebVC - is based on the AVC constrained baseline profile which performance is well-known and satisfactory but, unfortunately, it is not clear which patents of the AVC patent pool apply to this profile. Hence, a working draft (WD) of WebVC will be provided (also publicly available) in order to get patent statements from companies. The WD will be publicly available by December 19th.

Further information:

Research issues: coding efficiency with using only royalty free coding tools whereby the optimization is first towards royalties and then efficiency.

MPEG-H

A new star is born which is called MPEG-H referred to as "High Efficiency Coding and Media Delivery in Heterogeneous Environments" comprising three parts: Pt. 1 MMT, Pt. 2 HEVC, Pt. 3 3D Audio. There's a document called context and objective of MPEG-H but I can't find out whether it's public (I come back later on this).

Part 1: MMT (MPEG Media Transport) is progressing (slowly) but a next step should be definitely to check the relationship of MMT and DASH for which an Ad-hoc Group has been established (N12395), subscribe here, if interested.
Research issues: very general at the moment, what is the best delivery method (incl. formats) for future multimedia applications? Answer: It depends, ... ;-)

Part 2: HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding) made significant progress at the last meeting, in particular: only one entropy coder (note: AVC has two, CABAC and CAVLC which are supported in different profiles), 8 bit decoding (could be also 10 bit, probably done in some profiles), specific integer transform, stabilized and more complete high-level syntax and HRD description (i.e., reference picture buffering, tiles, slices, and wavefronts enabling parallel decoding process). Finally, a prototype has been demonstrated decoding HEVC in software on an iPad 2 at WVGA resolution and the 10min Big Buck Bunny sequence at SD resolution with avg. 800 kbit/s which clearly outperformed the corresponding AVC versions.
Research issues: well, coding efficiency, what else? The ultimative goal to have a performance gain of more than 50% compared to the predecessor which is AVC.

Part 3: 3D Audio Coding (3DAC) is in its early stages but there will be an event during San Jose meeting which will be announced here. As of now, use cases are provided (home theatre, personal TV, smartphone TV, multichannel TV) as well as candidate requirements and evaluation methods. One important aspect seems to be user experience for highly immersive audio (i.e., 22.2, 10.2, 5.1) including bitstream adaptation for low-bandwidth and low-complexity.
Research issues: sorry, I'm not really an audio guy but I assume it's coding efficiency, specifically for 22.2 channels ;-)

Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (CDVS)

For CDVS, responses to the call for proposals (from 10 companies/institutions) have been evaluated and a test model has been established based on the best performing proposals. The next steps include the improvement of the test model towards for inclusion in the MPEG-7 standard.
Research issues: descriptor efficiency for the intended application as well as precision on the information retrieval results.

Multimedia Preservation Description Information (MPDI)

The aim of this new work item is to provide "standard technology helping users to preserve digital multimedia that is used in many different domains, including cultural heritage, scientific research, engineering, education and training, entertainment, and fine arts for long-term across system, organizational, administrative and generational boundaries". It comes along with two public documents, the current requirements and a call for requirements which are due at the 100th MPEG meeting in April 2002.
Research issues: What and how to preserve digital multimedia information?

Augmented Reality (AR)

MPEG's newest project is on Augmented Reality (AR), starting with an application format for which a working draft exists. Furthermore, draft requirements and use cases are available. These three documents will be available on Dec 31st.
Research issues: N/A

Finally, I hope now you can better understand what I've put at the beginning with all these acronyms ...

#MPEG98 report: DASH=IS ✔ CDVS=CfP eval ✔ {MMT, HEVC, 3DAudio}=MPEG-H ✔ IVC={IVC, WebVC} ✔ 3DVC=CfP eval ✔

CfP: QoMEX 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:01:00 +0000

Call for Papers: QoMEX 2012

5th - 7th July 2012

Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia
http://www.qomex2012.org/

The fourth International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX) will bring together leading professionals and scientists interested in evaluating multimedia quality and user experience. QoMEX is the flagship workshop of the European COST action Qualinet which serves as its technical and financial sponsor. The 2012 workshop is the first of the series to be held in the Asia-Pacific and provides new opportunities for QoMEX to explore the rich technology interests of the region. The workshop venue is in the Yarra Valley, Australia, just north of Melbourne where ICME will be held from 9th July.

QoMEX is the flagship workshop of the European COST action Qualinet which serves as its technical and financial sponsor. The 2012 workshop is the first of the series to be held in the Asia- Pacific and provides new opportunities for QoMEX to explore the rich technology interests of the region.

Multimedia is a ubiquitous part of modern life; content is delivered on a wide variety of devices both fixed and mobile, the consumption environment can vary dramatically and increasingly users demand fulfilling interaction with their media. Evaluation, both objectively and subjectively of separate audio, video or image content is well known, but there are substantial challenges in evaluating users' complete experiences of mixed content. This is exacerbated by the diversity of devices, interfaces, consumption environments and content prevalent in today's market. Increasingly, evaluation approaches must include psychological, perceptual and contextual dimensions to truly represent and measure users experiences. Understanding how users react and perceive content and applications will inform and improve new applications and lead to improved user experiences.

QoMEX 2012 features oral presentations, exhibits, panels and poster sessions, providing attendees with various opportunities to discuss the latest progress and trends in multimedia user experience. The workshop venue and format has been specifically chosen to increase opportunities for expert interaction and discussion. Authors are invited to submit full- length, six- page papers according to the guidelines available on the conference website: http://www.qomex2012.org .

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Visual User Experience (Image/Video/Graphics): Objective and subjective quality evaluation, psychovisual modelling, quality- centered processing, compression and transmission, QoE evaluation in HD and beyond.
Auditory User Experience (Speech/Audio): Psychoacoustic modelling, quality assessment of interactive speech and audio applications/ interfaces, models and metrics for evaluation of spatial audio.
Sensory User Experiences: Novel sensory interfaces, methods for sensory user feedback, quality metrics and assessment methods for evaluation of ambient and sensory experiences.
QoE for Mobile Devices: device- dependent, adaptive user interfaces, evaluating interactive experiences on mobile devices, objective and subjective evaluation on iPhone/Android/mobile multimedia Applications.
QoE for 3D Multimedia: QoE metrics and evaluation methods for 3D audio and 3D video, virtual, augmented and mixed realities, haptic interaction, other immersive modalities and interactive interfaces.
Standardization Activities in Multimedia Quality Evaluation: Benchmarking efforts, multimedia databases/ datasets of various modalities (speech, audio, video, sensory, etc.) and fidelities (quality, bitrate, etc.), testing conditions and methods, new objective metrics/models for upcoming standards.
Applications and services: Evaluating QoE in multimedia applications e.g., games/gamification, biomedical/ telemedicine, distance education, teleconferencing/telepresence, multimedia web search/ browsing, cloud- based multimedia applications, etc.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: February 14, 2012
Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2012
Camera- ready submission: May 14, 2012

Web site: http://www.qomex2012.org/

Organizing Committee

General Chair

Ian Burnett, RMIT University

General Co-Chair

Henry Wu, RMIT University

Technical Program Co-Chairs

Christian Timmerer, Alpen-Adria-Universität
Alexander Raake, TU Berlin
Christian Ritz, University of Wollongong

Steering Committee

Loretta Anania, EC
Alan Bovik, University of Texas
Touradj Ebrahimi, EPFL/NTNU
Khaled El-Maleh, Qualcomm USA
David Geerts, IBBT ‐ KULeuven
Lina Karam, Arizona State University
Bastiaan Kleijn, Victoria University of Wellington
Sebastian Möler, TU Berlin
Fernando Pereira, Instituto de Telecomunicações
Andrew Perkis, NTNU-Q2S
Amy Reibman, AT&T Labs
Peter Schelkens, IBBT ‐ VUB

Publicity Chairs

Christian Timmerer, Alpen-Adria-Universität (Europe)
Homer Chen, National Taiwan University (Asia and Pacific)

Social Program and Local Arrangements Chair

Lorraine Valladares, RMIT University

Webmaster

Stephen Davis, University of Wollongong

Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt participates in New FP7 Project on Social Networks

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:04:00 +0000

Social media applications have become a modern reality affecting a growing part of the population, as well as companies and public organisations. For example, twitter messages played an important role in the recent developments in Arab countries, while Flickr and YouTube are rich image and video collections based exclusively on user contributions and around 30 billion content items (links, photo albums, status updates) are posted on Facebook every month. It becomes clear that, much of what happens in the real-world is documented in real time by the millions of social network users that upload content, interact with each other, and give feedback (rate, comment) on already published online content. It is equally important that social networks and applications can be used for a plethora of diverse applications, beyond sharing, networking, news and entertainment. For example, they have been used for emergency planning and response, in travel and tourism, in e-government, and in product monitoring.

SocialSensor is a 3-year FP7 European Integrated Project, which aims at exploiting information in social networks and developing applications that enhance user experience. In the project framework, new techniques for analysis, aggregation and real-time search of user-generated content will be developed, in order to extract useful information and make it available for use in different applications. Innovative solutions from the fields of information extraction and retrieval, social network analysis, user modelling, semantic web services, and media adaptation, delivery and presentation, will compose a software platform that crawls and analyses multimedia User Generated Content from the social web, combines it with professional content, and makes it searchable for professional users, but also recommends, delivers and presents it to media consumers depending on their context and their personal profile. To achieve this, crucial issues have to be tackled, such as the sheer data volume, its heterogeneity and low quality.

The platform will be showcased and evaluated in two use cases: (a) news, involving professional news editors, journalists and casual readers, benefiting from the improved capabilities of SocialSensor for discovering new interesting social content and integrating it in the news creation and delivery lifecycle, and (b) infotainment, providing new multimedia search tools and unique media consumption experiences to attendants of large events (e.g. festivals). Providing real-time social indexing capabilities for both of these use cases is expected to have a transformational impact on both sectors.

In the project, whose total budget is €9.64 million, Alpen-Adria-Universität (AAU) Klagenfurt, Multimedia Communications Group participates, with research activities on media streaming and sharing within social networks. The consortium comprises 11 participants in total, coming from different universities and research organizations (CERTH-Informatics and Telematics Institute (co-ordinator), University of Koblenz-Landau, City University London, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), as well as from the IT industry and news domains (IBM Israel, Yahoo! Spain, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Deutsche Welle, Athens Technology Center, JCP-Consult).

For more information please contact: Dr. Christian Timmerer, AAU/TEWI/ITEC/MMC, christian.timmerer@itec.aau.at or the co-ordinators Dr. Ioannis Kompatsiaris, CERTH-ITI, ikom@iti.gr

CfP: ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR) 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:35:00 +0000

CALL FOR PAPERS

ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR) 2012

June 5-8, 2012, Hong Kong

http://www.icmr2012.org/

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2012

Multimedia computing, indexing and retrieval continue to be one of the most exciting and fastest-growing research areas in the field of multimedia technology. The Second ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR) offers opportunities for the exchange of ideas between researchers, practitioners and potential users of multimedia retrieval systems. This conference, puts together the long-lasting experience of former ACM CIVR and ACM MIR series, was set up to illuminate the state of the art in multimedia (including image, video and audio) retrieval.

ICMR 2012 is seeking original high quality submissions addressing innovative research in the broad field of multimedia retrieval. Contributions addressing the challenges of large-scale search and user behavior analysis are especially welcome.

Topics of Interest (not limited to)

Content/semantic/affective based indexing and retrieval
Large-scale and web-scale multimedia processing
Integration of content, meta data and social network
Scalable and distributed search
User behavior and HCI issues in multimedia retrieval
Advanced descriptors and similarity metrics
Multimedia fusion
High performance indexing algorithms
Machine learning for multimedia retrieval
Ontology for annotation and search
3D video and model processing
Large-scale summarization and visualization
Performance evaluation
Very large scale multimedia corpus
Navigation and browsing on the Web
Retrieval from multimodal lifelogs
Database architectures for storage and retrieval
Novel multimedia data management systems and applications
Applications in forensic, biomedical image and video collections

Important Dates

Paper Submission: January 15, 2012
Notification of Acceptance: March 15, 2012
Camera-Ready Papers Due: April 5, 2012
Conference Date: June 5-8, 2012

Questions?

More information at: http://www.icmr2012.org/
Printed version of CfP: http://www.icmr2012.org/index.files/icmr2012-cfp.pdf

HOW TO: Connect With Computing Now on the Social Web

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:45:00 +0000

--inspired by HOW TO: Connect with Mashable on the Social Web.

As Computing Now (CN) is growing in terms of readers, also the number of topics we cover is growing and the ways readers access our content. Most of our readers signed up for our newsletter but there are various other ways accessing our content which I'd like to summarize and highlight within this blog post.

Follow via RSS feeds: Various feeds are available featuring CN Monthly Theme Articles, CN What's New Articles, CN Newsfeed, and CN News Briefs. Additionally, various feeds for podcasts and blogs related to CN are available (see also below).

Computing Now Content and News

Podcasts

Blogs

Follow via Email, i.e., subscribe to our free newsletters and alerts, select "Computing Now" from the check-box but feel free selecting also others! Furthermore, you may subscribe to our issue alerts for all CS magazines and transactions.

Follow @computingnow via Twitter maintained by @timse7 as well as CS staff. Realize the "engage" part of Computing Now by joining the conversation in and around vital topics related to computer science.

Follow on Facebook, discuss topics there, interact with the staff and other volunteers and/or connect on LinkedIn. Finally, you may join our YouTube channel for latest videos and interviews.

Finally, a couple of Applications have been developed recently and are continuously updated: CN iPhone App, CN Android App, CN iGoogle App.

Stay tuned and if you think something is missing, please let me know and/or approach me with your ideas!

CfP: MMM2012 Video Browser Showdown

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 07:35:00 +0000

CALL FOR PAPERS

**Video Browser Showdown**

http://mmm2012.org/vbshowdown/

January 6, 2012, Klagenfurt University, Klagenfurt, Austria.

The Video Browser Showdown (held as a separate session of MMM 2012) is a live video browsing competition where international researchers, working in the field of interactive video search, evaluate and demonstrate the efficiency of their tools in presence of the audience. The aim of the Video Browser Showdown is to evaluate video browsing tools for their efficiency at "Known Item Search"(KIS) tasks with a well-defined data set in direct comparison with other tools. For each KIS task the searchers need to interactively find a short video clip in a one-hour video file within a specific time limit.

The Video Browser Showdown will be a moderated "special demo session" of MMM 2012, where 24 KIS tasks (2◊12) need to be solved. For each task the moderator presents the target clip on a shared screen that is visible to all participants. The participants use their own equipment to perform an interactive search in the specified video file (taken from a common data set). The performance of participating tools will be evaluated in terms of successful answers and average search time. The decision for the best-performing tool is based on two runs:

expert run: the participants (developers of the tools) themselves act as searchers
novice run: volunteers from the audience act as searchers (after a short training phase)

The overall best-performing tool will be awarded with the "Best Video Browser" certificate.

No Metadata:
============
The videos to be used for the Video Browser Showdown will be provided without any metadata.
However, participants are allowed to perform any content analysis that supports interactive browsing in the video (e.g., through novel content visualization, content clustering, or advanced seeker-bars etc.). The search process must be interactive, i.e., no text-queries are allowed.

Participation:
==============
Anyone who has a video browsing tool that allows to interactively browse, explore, or navigate in a single video file (search shouldnít be based on automatic queries) may participate. Examples of tools of interest are: a video shot browser(e.g., temporal-based or concept-based), a video player with extended navigation/interaction means, a video content exploration tool, or tools using advanced visualizations for improved navigation/interaction("video surrogates") etc. Also tools developed for interactive video search on mobile devices are of interest.

Submission:
===========
To apply for participation please submit a scientific paper (2-3 pages in Springer LNCS format) to one of the organizers via email until October 7, 2011. The submission should include a detailed description of the interaction with the video browsing tool and how it supports interactive search in video. Submissions will be peer-reviewed to ensure maximum quality. Accepted submissions will be published in the conference proceedings of MMM 2012.

Important dates:
================
October 7, 2011 paper submission (2-3 pages, Springer LNCS)
October 12, 2011 notification of acceptance
October 19, 2011 camera-ready versions due
January 6, 2012 competition at MMM 2012

Organizers:
===========
Klaus Schoeffmann, Klagenfurt University, Austria, ks@itec.aau.at
Werner Bailer, JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Austria, werner.bailer@joanneum.at
Cees Snoek, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, cgmsnoek@uva.nl

More information:
=================
http://mmm2012.org/vbshowdown/

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia: Special Issue on Smart, social and converged TV

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:26:00 +0000

CALL FOR PAPERS

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

Special Issue on Smart, social and converged TV

*Important Dates*:

- Submission deadline: 25-Sep-2011

- First notification: 30-Jan-2012

- Revised manuscript (for 2nd review) due: 15-Mar-2012

- Notification of acceptance: 05-May-2012

- Final manuscript due: 31-May-2012

- Tentative publication date: Last quarter of 2012 (TBD)

*URL: http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/uploads/special_issues_deadlines/converged_tv.pdf

*Summary*

The move to web-based television has challenged the traditional

television value chain by allowing any IP-based network, wired and

wireless, to deliver high quality television content. In this new

paradigm for content consumption, TV-related services are expected to

play a decisive role for fixed, nomadic and mobile devices over

heterogeneous networks. Consequently, the rapid adoption of web-based

TV applications is fueled by user demands for social and

user-generated multimedia content, in addition to the traditional

linear and on-demand offerings. As well, the new television is social,

allowing exchange of ratings and comments between viewers; connected,

with content available on many devices and via many networks; and

smart, thanks to application stores and personalized offerings. As a

result, TV convergence, as a significant problem for next generation

networks and devices, is becoming a popular topic for network, device,

content and user experience research. Significant challenges need to

be addressed from heterogeneous bandwidth management, content

protection and distribution architectures to visual perception and

quality of experience.

*Scope:*

This special issue is focused on recent disruptions in IP-based and

Web-based TV. According to this framework, it wants to provide avenues

for future research in the emerging areas of social, connected and

smart TV. The targeted audience combines researchers in the many

aspects of the end to end delivery of converged TV services but also

practitioners and strategic business managers who need to know “what

is next” in terms of video and television services, applications and

the overall value chain.

The editors of this special issue solicit original and innovative

technical papers that include (but are not limited to) the following

topics:

- Next generation converged TV architecture and performance -

especially those combining heterogeneous networks and platforms

- Quality of experience in social TV systems and applications over

mobile and converged networks

- Performance of novel approaches to TV network design including

wireless Internet TV

- Analysis and simulation of TV services over heterogeneous networks

- Analysis and simulation of content distribution and transmission technologies

- Performance of novel content protection especially for Peer-to-Peer

and community TV viewing

- End-to-End TV quality of experience including monitoring, measuring

and user behavior

- Content modeling and metadata for next generation converged TV

*Submission Procedure:*

Prospective authors should submit high quality, original manuscripts

that have not appeared, nor are under consideration, in any other

journals. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the

online IEEE manuscript submission system at

(http://tmmieee.manuscriptcentral.com/). All papers will be reviewed

by at least three independent reviewers. Papers should be formatted

according to the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia guidelines for

authors (please visit:

http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/tmm/author_info.html

*Organization:*

All papers will be reviewed by at least three independent reviewers.

Invited papers will be solicited first through white papers to ensure

the quality and relevance to the special issue. The accepted invited

papers will be reviewed by the guest editors and expect to account for

about one fourth of the papers in the special issue.

*Guest Editors:*

- Oscar M Bonastre, PhD. Operations Research Centre, Miguel Hernandez

University, Spain (Lead Guest Editor)

Email: ombonastre@ieee.org

- Marie-Jose Montpetit, PhD. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(MIT), USA Email: mariejo@mit.edu

- Pablo Cesar, PhD. Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, (CWI), Netherlands

Email: P.S.Cesar@cwi.nl

- Zhu Liu, PhD. AT&T Labs – Research, USA

Email: zliu@research.att.com

- Jon Crowcroft, PhD. Cambridge University, UK

Email: jon.crowcroft@cl.cam.ac.uk

- Maja Matijašević, PhD. University of Zagreb, Croatia

Email: maja.matijasevic@fer.hr

Please address all correspondences regarding this special issue to the

Guest Editors

QoMEX2011: Call for Participation

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:15:00 +0000

The Third International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX) will bring together leading professionals and scientists who are developing methods for evaluating multimedia quality and user experience. The workshop is organized on September 7-9, 2011 in Mechelen, Belgium in the vicinity of Brussels. The conference program of QoMEX 2011 has been published on the conference website www.qomex.org together with venue information.

QoMEX 2011 features an exciting program with plenary talks by:

Nasir Memon (Polytechnic Institute of New York University, New York) on ‘Image and Video Forensics’
Arnold Vermeeren (TU Delft) & Effie Law (University of Leicester/ETH Zurich) on ‘Good User Experience: Yes! But what is it?’
Karlheinz Brandenburg (Ilmenau University of Technology/Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology ) on ‘Audio Quality: Listening Tests, Objective Measures and What Else?’
Cédric Marchessoux (Barco) on ‘Why medical display quality is a crucial factor in visualization in Healthcare!’

and lecture and poster sessions on ‘QoE: How to Define, Assess and Apply?’, ‘2D, 3D and Interactive Video QoE’, ‘Visual Quality Metrics and Models’, ‘Audio(-visual) QoE’, ‘Perception & Testing’ and ‘Image Structure & Visual Attention’.

Furthermore, a special session on ‘Qualinet Industry Forum’ is organized including a panel discussion on 'QoE in Applications, Standardization and Certification’ moderated by Fernando Pereira (Instituto Superior Técnico Instituto de Telecomunicações) and having as panel members Arthur Webster (National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Institute for Telecommunication Sciences NTIA/ITS, US), Ingrid Heynderickx (Philips Research Laboratories ,The Netherlands), Karlheinz Brandenburg (Institute for Media Technology at Ilmenau University of Technology, Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT, German) and Touradj Ebrahimi (PEFL, Switzerland).

MPEG news: a report from the 97th meeting, Torino, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:39:00 +0000

The 97th MPEG meeting in Torino brought a few interesting news which I'd like to report here briefly. Of course, as usual, there is the official press release, however, I'd like to report on some interesting topics as follows:

MPEG Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) reached FDIS status
Call for Proposals: Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (CDVS)
Call for Proposals: Internet Video Coding (IVC)
DIS on MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH)

MPEG Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) reached FDIS status

ISO/IEC 23003-3 aka Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) reached FDIS status and soon will be an International Standard. The FDIS itself won't be publicly available but the Unified Speech and Audio Coding Verification Test Report in September 2011 (most likely here).

Call for Proposals: Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (CDVS)

I reported previously about that and here comes the final CfP including the evaluation framework.

MPEG is planning standardizing technologies that will enable efficient and interoperable design of visual search applications. In particular we are seeking technologies for visual content matching in images or video. Visual content matching includes matching of views of objects, landmarks, and printed documents that is robust to partial occlusions as well as changes in vantage point, camera parameters, and lighting conditions.

There are a number of component technologies that are useful for visual search, including format of visual descriptors, descriptor extraction process, as well as indexing, and matching algorithms. As a minimum, the format of descriptors as well as parts of their extraction process should be defined to ensure interoperability.

It is envisioned that a standard for compact descriptors will:

ensure interoperability of visual search applications and databases,
enable high level of performance of implementations conformant to the standard,
simplify design of descriptor extraction and matching for visual search applications,
enable hardware support for descriptor extraction and matching in mobile devices,
reduce load on wireless networks carrying visual search-related information.

It is envisioned that such standard will provide a complementary tool to the suite of existing MPEG standards, such as MPEG-7 Visual Descriptors. To build full visual search application this standard may be used jointly with other existing standards, such as MPEG Query Format, HTTP, XML, JPEG, JPSec, and JPSearch.

The Call for Proposals and the Evaluation Framework is publicly available. From a research perspective, it would be interesting to see how technologies submitted as an answer to the CfP compete with existing approaches and applications/services.

In this context, it is probably worth looking at IEEE Multimedia Jul.-Sep. 2011 issue which is dedicated to visual content: identification and search including an overview about this new MPEG standard.

Call for Proposals: Internet Video Coding (IVC)

I reported previously about that and the final CfP for Internet Video Coding Technologies is available here. The requirements reveal some interesting issues the call is about:

Real-time communications, video chat, video conferencing,
Mobile streaming, broadcast and communications,
Mobile devices and Internet connected embedded devices
Internet broadcast streaming, downloads
Content sharing.

Requirements fall into the following major categories:

IPR requirements
Technical requirements
Implementation complexity requirements

Clearly, this work item has an optimization towards IPR but others are not excluded. In particular,

It is anticipated that any patent declaration associated with the Baseline Profile of this standard will indicate that the patent owner is prepared to grant a free of charge license to an unrestricted number of applicants on a worldwide, non-discriminatory basis and under other reasonable terms and conditions to make, use, and sell implementations of the Baseline Profile of this standard in accordance with the ITU-T/ITU-R/ISO/IEC Common Patent Policy.

MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH)

For all DASH enthusiast, the latest - and probably almost final - version of DASH-related standards can be found here. Please note that DASH has been reorganized into MPEG-DASH referred to as ISO/IEC DIS 23009-1.2, Part 1: Media presentation description and segment formats. Additionally, you might be interested in the following draft:

ISO/IEC 14496-12:2008/DAM 3, Part 12: ISO base media file format, AMENDMENT 3: DASH support and RTP reception hint track processing
ISO/IEC FDIS 23001-7, Part 7: Common encryption format for ISO base media file format

All these DASH-related documents are publicly available here. In terms of implementation, the interested reader might check out the ITEC-DASH VLC-based implementation and GPAC (which provides basic support for DASH) respectively.

Further information you may find at the MPEG Web site, specifically under the hot news section and the press release. Working documents of any MPEG standard so far can be found here. If you want to join any of these activities, the list of Ad-hoc Groups (AhG) is available here (soon also here) including the information how to join their reflectors.

Computing Now Archive: November'11 "Challenges and Opportunities in Mobile Web and App Development"

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:36:00 +0000

I'm collecting here an archive of the Computing Now monthly themes and hope you find it valuable*.

November 2011: Challenges and Opportunities in Mobile Web and App Development by Ron Vetter

Mobile devices differ at the hardware level and in terms of their software development environments, so developing mobile applications that can run across multiple heterogeneous devices is challenging. More...

October 2011: Web Service Choreographies by Marco Aurélio Gerosa and Valérie Issarny

In the future Internet, scale will change everything. Web service choreographies offer a promising approach to coping with this challenge, but research is still in its earliest stages. More...

September 2011: Exascale Computing by Dejan Milojicic

US national agencies expect exascale computing to be a reality by 2020, but making it happen in a sustainable, reliable way will require us to rethink fundamental assumptions about interconnects, memory, CPU designs, and more. More...

August 2011: Social Networking by Tom Costello

Social networking brings with it a host of new and existing challenges, and the approaches that we collectively use to handle them will form the social networking framework of the future. More...

July 2011: The Software Business by John Fabro

What business models are the most successful in the software industry? How is the cloud changing the software business? Should competitors share information? More...

June 2011: Cybersecurity by Kevin Rudd

Of all the topics that fall under the "cyber-" umbrella, one of the most interesting (and challenging) is cybersecurity. Explore aspects of cybersecurity including policy, education, infrastructure, and architecture. More...

May 2011: Green IT: Helping to Create a Sustainable Planet by San Murugesan

Explore the many dimensions of green IT and learn how greening IT can improve our environment while enabling growth and development. More...

April 2011: Entrepreneurship and Innovation by Ron Vetter

This month on Computing Now, explore successful innovation models, the skills innovation leaders should possess, how to incorporate entrepreneurial thinking into engineering curricula, and more. More...

March 2011: Data Storage Evolution by Sundara Nagarajan

As end users become more empowered, creative application developers are moving data to the center of their system designs. Learn about the factors influencing this shift. More...

February 2011: Novel Architectures and Accelerators by George K. Thiruvathukal

Learn how application accelerators can dramatically shorten the execution time for many applications—for everything from desktop computing to supercomputing. More...

January 2011: Services Computing by Liang-Jie (LJ) Zhang

Learn how services computing can enable IT services and computing technology to create, operate, and manage business services more efficiently and effectively. More...

12-2010: The State of Open Source by Tom Costello
11-2010: MPEG Technologies and Applications: Interoperability, Rights Management, and Adaptation by Jaime Delgado
10-2010: Mathematics Chasing Complexity by Michael Shafto
09-2010: Hardware Security and Trust by Mohammad Tehranipoor and Farinaz Koushanfar
08-2010: Context-Aware Computing: Beyond Search and Location-Based Services by Pankaj Mehra
07-2010: Digital Human Faces by Catherine Pelachaud and Tamy Boubekeur
06-2010: Software-Defined Radio by Kevin W. Rudd and Chris Anderson
05-2010: IT Workforce by Tom Costello
04-2010: Agility and Architecture by Maurizio Morisio
03-2010: Directions in Enterprise Data Storage Systems by Sundara Nagarajan
02-2010: Biometrics by Ron Vetter and Karl Ricanek Jr.
01-2010: 2010 Computing Outlook by Vinton G. Cerf and Munindar P. Singh
12-2009: Multimedia Metadata and Semantic Management by Harald Kosch and Christian Timmerer
11-2009: Society Online by Daniel Zeng and Hsinchun Chen
10-2009: System Virtualization by Keith Farkas
09-2009: Cloud Computing: Opportunities and Challenges by Dejan Milojicic
08-2009: Populating Virtual Worlds by Norman I. Badler and Carol O’Sullivan
07-2009: Professional Ethics by Ron Vetter
06-2009: IPTV—Reinventing Television in the Internet Age by Greg Thompson and Yih-Farn Robin Chen
05-2009: Web 2.0 Publishing and Happy 1.0, Computing Now! by George K. Thiruvathukal
04-2009: Trust Management by Sotirios Terzis
03-2009: Serious Games by Tiffany Barnes and L. Miguel Encarnação
02-2009: Cloud Computing by Thomas Costello
01-2009: IEEE Software's 25th Anniversary by Maurizio Morisio
12-2008: Technological Innovations for the Modern Museum by Dorée Duncan Seligmann
11-2008: Challenges and Opportunities in Computer Architecture by Kevin Rudd
10-2008: Software Tools by Maurizio Morisio
09-2008: Mobile Graphics by Kari Pulli
08-2008: Hacking for Innovation by Joseph A. Paradiso
07-2008: E-Voting by Anup Ghosh
06-2008: Agile Methods by Maurizio Morisio
05-2008: Games

* Please note that only the articles of the current month are freely available, others simply link to the CS digital library.

CfP: Multimedia Systems 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:30:00 +0000

Call For Papers

Multimedia Systems 2012 (MMSys 2012)

February 22-24, 2012

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

http://www.mmsys.org

Important Dates:

September 19, 2011: Submission Deadline
November 1, 2011: Notification Date

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for the 3rd Multimedia Systems (MMSys) Conference to be held Feb. 22-24, 2012 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. The Multimedia Systems conference provides a forum for researchers, engineers, and scientist to present and share their latest research findings in multimedia systems. While research about specific aspects of multimedia systems is regularly published in the various proceedings and transactions of the networking, operating system, real-time system, and database communities, MMSys aims to cut across these domains in the context of multimedia data types. This provides a unique opportunity to view the intersections and interplay of the various approaches and solutions developed across these domains to deal with multimedia data types. Furthermore, MMSys provides an avenue for communicating research that addresses multimedia systems holistically.

For MMSys 2011, a Special Session on Modern Media Transport: DASH was organized. It was very successful in terms of attendance, presentations and discussions. The match of interests between special session and main conference was very satisfying, and MMT DASH will be fully integrated into the main MMSys conference from 2012. Highly appreciated program points such as the data set track of MMSys 2011 will of course also return for MMSys 2012.

Submissions

Full papers: no more than 12 pages
Short papers: no more than 6 pages
Dataset papers: no more than 6 pages
Demos: no more than 6 pages

Full, short and dataset papers will be presented in single track sessions.

Dataset Track

Datasets must be available online. Submissions require a URL pointing to the dataset.

Datasets must be accompanied by a short paper, which can be up to 6 pages long. The paper should describe the format of the data collected, the methodology used to collect the dataset, and basic statistics of the dataset.

Authors of datasets accepted for publication will receive:

Dataset hosting from MMSys for at least 5 years.
Citable publication of the dataset description in the proceedings.
Inclusion in a poster session at the conference.
Discounted conference registration.

Datasets should be appropriately anonymized.

Datasets will be evaluated by the committee on the basis of the collection methodology and the value of the dataset as a resource for the research community.

Full and Short Paper Tracks

Full papers submitted can be up to 12 pages long. Short papers can be up to 6 pages long.

Authors of papers that rely upon or use an underlying dataset are encouraged to also submit the dataset to the dataset track if possible.

Generic multimedia systems topics include:

Multimedia Systems
Multimedia Networking
Multimedia Operating Systems
Multimedia Databases
Large-Scale and Remote Display Architectures
Real-Time Support For Multimedia
Networked Games
Virtual and Augmented Worlds
Cyber-Physical Systems
Peer-to-Peer Architectures for Streaming and Multicast
Modeling of Multimedia Systems
Multimedia Interfaces
Multimedia Middleware and Toolkits
Multimedia Programming Languages
Cloud-based Multimedia Processing
Multi-Core Support for Multimedia
Mobile Multimedia Systems
3D and Multiview Streaming

Special DASH topics interest include:

Adaptive, progressive DASH delivery
Live DASH streaming
Use of content distribution infrastructure components
Viewer experiences from large-scale experiments and events
Content generation for DASH-based delivery
Measurement techniques for collecting consumption data
Effects of adaptation on Quality-of-Experience
Combinations of DASH with other streaming standards
Innovative DASH-based applications

Demos

Demo submissions consist of a short paper (up to 6 pages) and a visual presentation of the demo.

Demos must be submitted as animated presentations or videos. Presentations must be viewable in Powerpoint or Acrobat reader, videos must be viewable in VLC. Demos will be evaluated based on scientific as well as engineering content, and their potential for demonstrating new or recent research results in a convincing manner.

Demos will be presented in a plenum session with a 5-minute presentation of every accepted demo.

Demonstrator can expect a table, power outlet, and wireless Internet.

Organization

General Chair: Mark Claypool, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA, USA

Technical Program Chair: Carsten Griwodz, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway

Local Arrangement Chair: Ketan Mayer-Patel, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Technical Program Committee

Ali Begen, Cisco, USA
Andreas Mauthe, University of Lancaster, UK
Baochun Li, University of Toronto, Canada
Bogdan Ghita, University of Plymouth, UK
Christian Timmerer, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Cyril Concolato, Telecom Paristech, France
Grenville Armitage, Swinburne University, Australia
Hermann Hellwagner, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Jiangchuan Liu, Simon Frasier University, Canada
Kang Li, University of Georgia, GA, USA
Kevin Almeroth, University of Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Klara Nahrstedt, University of Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
Laszlo Böszömenyi, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Michael Zink, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA
Nabil Sarhan, Wayne State University, USA
Nicholas Race, University of Lancaster, UK
Paal Halvorsen, University of Oslo, Norway
Pablo Cesar, CWI, The Netherlands
Per Frödh, Ericsson, Sweden
Prashant Shenoy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA
Ralf Steinmetz, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany
Rittwik Jana, AT&T Research, USA
Roger Zimmermann, National University of Singapore
Seon Ho Kim, University of Southern California, CA, USA
Sheng-Wei (Kuan-Ta) Chen, Academica Sinica, Taiwan
Shervin Shirmohammadi, University of Ottawa, Canada
Songqing Chen, George Mason University, VA, USA
Surendar Chandra, FXPal, CA, USA
Thomas Schierl, Fraunhofer, Germany
Thomas Stockhammer, Nomor Research Gmbh, Germany
Travis Schuessler, Intel, OR, USA
Wei Tsang Ooi, National University of Singapore

Cooperations

MMSys 2012 will host the 3rd Workshop on Mobile Video Delivery (MoViD). Please see http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/movid/

Computing Now 3rd Anniversary: A Social Networking Perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:04:00 +0000

Please find below a social networking perspective I've put together for Computing Nows' 3rd year anniversary using Storify. Let me know your thoughts and ideas in the comments....

HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 07:07:00 +0000

*** Updated with current DASH status and MMSys'12, see below ***

During its last meeting, MPEG issued a call for proposals on HTTP streaming of MPEG media. In particular, the following documents have been approved and will are publicly available here.

HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media Context and Objectives [doc]
Call For Proposals on HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media [doc] - updated Annex A & B according to AhG meeting from 2010/05/12-13 Princeton, NJ [doc]
Uses Cases for HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media [doc]
Requirements on HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media [doc]

All documents in a single ZIP file can be found here.

MPEG has developed various technologies for multimedia transport, such as MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) and ISO Media Base File Format. These technologies have been widely accepted and heavily used by various industries and applications, such as digital broadcasting, audio and video transport over the Internet, mobile phones, etc.

In recent years, the Internet has become an important channel for delivery of multimedia. As the HTTP protocol is widely used on the Internet, it has recently been used extensively for the delivery of multimedia content. However, there is no standard for HTTP-based streaming of MPEG media. MPEG intends to standardize a solution that addresses this need.

The main objectives of this new standard are:

efficient delivery of MPEG media over HTTP in an adaptive, progressive, download/streaming fashion;
support of live streaming of multimedia content;
efficient and ease of use of existing content distribution infrastructure components such as CDNs, proxies, caches, NATs and firewalls;
support of integrated services with multiple components;
support for signaling, delivery, utilization of multiple content protection and rights management schemes; and
support for efficient content forwarding and relay.

Timeline of the calls and preliminary development plan:

Final call for proposals: 2010/04 - DONE
Ad-hoc Group meeting for editing the HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media Requirements document by improving applicability of requirement and making the document available by 2010/05/13. - DONE
Ad-hoc Group meeting for the evaluation of the received responses on Saturday and Sunday before 93rd MPEG meeting in Geneva (2010/07/24-25)
Working Draft: 2010/07 - DONE (not public though)
Committee Draft: 2010/10 - DONE (available here at SC29 ballot site)
Draft International Standard: 2011/01 - DONE (publicly available here)
Draft International Standard v2: 2011/07 - DONE (publicly available here)
International Standard: 2011/11 (approx.)

For discussions related to this CfP, please subscribe to the DASH reflector.

Related work (or a list of candidate technologies, if you like) - in alphabetic order

Disclaimer: this is my personal view and does neither reflect MPEG's view nor my view as chair of this AhG.

3GPPs' Adaptive HTTP Streaming (AHS): introduced recently which defines a Media Presentation Description (MDP) and extensions to the well known ISO Base Media File Format.
Adobes' Dynamic HTTP Streaming: according to their Web site, this will be available in late May 2010 (i.e., should be NOW!) and is based on their own FMF manifest and F4F file format. The former is an XML document describing the session and the latter MP4 fragment files, i.e., also based on ISO Base Media File Format.
Apples' HTTP live streaming: well known for quite some time and implemented in the iPhone. It makes use of a M3U playlist file which serves as manifest and each media file must be formatted as an MPEG-2 Transport Stream or an MPEG-2 audio elementary stream.
Movstreaming: is already deployed but also highly proprietary. However, it works with common media players.
Microsofts' Smooth Streaming: also around for a while which utilizes a server manifest file (i.e., SMIL document) and a client manifest file (i.e., proprietary XML document). Furthermore, they've defined the smooth streaming format (ISMV) as an extension of the ISO Base Media File Format. Additionally, There's also a comparison with the solutions provided by Apple and Adobe available (I assume from Microsoft's point of view).
Open IPTV Forum (OIPF): has been published on Sep 7th, 2010 including "HTTP Adaptive Streaming" which adopts 3GPP AHS and adds support for MPEG-2 Transport Stream.

Interestingly, all of them (except for Movstreaming for which I cannot confirm) utilize some kind of manifest file and extend the ISO Base Media File Format. The manifest file does not follow any (metadata) standard such as MPEG-7 or MPEG-21 which, I think, could be used for defining the manifest with probably some minor extensions. In any case, this manifest file looks like an interesting use case for the concept of the Digital Item introduced by MPEG-21. Furthermore, it seems there is a need to extend the ISO Base Media File Format in order to support HTTP (live) streaming. Note that MPEG is current defining an amendment for part 12 of MPEG-4 - the home of the ISO Base Media File format - which is called "AMENDMENT 2: Support for sub-track selection & switching, post-decoder requirements, and color information":-) Finally, I've recently seen a paper (presented at MMSys'10) on a Low Overhead Container Format for Adaptive Streaming that proposes an alternative to the MPEG family of file formats for adaptive HTTP streaming. I wonder whether this is worth to consider ...

Recently, the IETF has received a number of new drafts (i.e., see here and here) addressing issues related to HTTP streaming.

DASH-related papers and events:

Watching Video over the Web by Ali C. Begen et. al
Second W3C Web and TV Workshop, February 8-9, 2011 in Berlin, Germany
Special Session related to DASH at ACM MMSys'11 (presentations are online and videos at portal.acm.org), February 23-25, 2011 in San Jose, CA, USA
Workshop on Multimedia on the Web, September 8, 2011 in Graz, Austria
The Third W3C Web and TV Workshop, 19-20 September, 2011, Hollywood, California, USA
MMSys 2012 with DASH-specific topics included, February 22-24, 2012, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.
Packet Video Workshop featuring DASH special session, May 10-11, 2012, Munich, Germany.

Related blog posts can be found here including an overview of DASH DIS.

Please let me know in case I've missed something (I'm pretty sure I have or you see an error) and I'm happy to extend (or revise) this list of related work / candidate technologies.

QoX: What is it really?

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 15:02:00 +0000

ETSI TC on Human Factors

This article provides a very good article around QoX where X stands for anything, specifically it encompasses Quality of Service (QoS), Class of Service (CoS), Grade of Service (GoS), Quality of Resilience (QoR), and - last but not least - Quality of Experience (QoE).

At the beginning the article provides an overview about different QoS definitions and application/traffic/service classes as defined by various standard-developing organizations (SDOs) such as ITU-T, IETF, 3GPP, and IEEE. Also an attempt to perform the mapping between service classes defined within various approaches is given. Additionally, no so well-known terms such as Grade of Service (GoS) and Quality of Resilience are described.

The article provides a good definition of Quality of Experience (QoE), its various dimensions, and how it relates to the other QoX terms and to a general model which defines three levels of QoS: intrinsic (network performance; ITU-T E.800), perceived (QoS; ITU-T G.1000), and assessed (QoE; ITU-T P.10). It is concluded that QoE is somewhere on the border between perceived and assessed which I tend to agree. Interestingly, the article points out the various dimensions of QoE including environmental, psychological, and sociological factors such as user expectation, experience with similar services, opinions of others (i.e., social networks), pricing policies, location-based factors, etc. Also, QoE measures and metrics, classification of QoE evaluation methods, and the relationship between QoE and intrinsic quality parameters are highlighted.

Finally, the article is concluded with open issues clusters into scientific, technical, economical, and legal challenges.

In particular, I like:

the introduction into the terminology and how QoX is realized in various SDOs (ITU-T, IETF, 3GPP, IEEE);
the definition of QoE and its variants; and
the challenges at the end.

However, I'm missing vital, novel, future applications in/around QoX, otherwise one might think that the aim of this research is providing a solution/fix to current issues only (btw. that's fine, don't get me wrong ;-)

Citation:
Stankiewicz, R.; Cholda, P.; Jajszczyk, A.; , "QoX: What is it really?," Communications Magazine, IEEE , vol.49, no.4, pp.148-158, April 2011
doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2011.5741159

MPEG issues Call for Proposals on 3D Video Coding Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:28:00 +0000

The aim of this Call for Proposals (CfP) is to provide efficient compression and high quality view reconstruction of an arbitrary number of dense views. This CfP has been issued by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) and the evaluation of submissions will be carried out at the 98th MPEG meeting after formal subjective evaluation.

The CfP is publicly available on the MPEG Web site and also here.

The CfP provides all necessary information regarding purpose and procedure, timeline, test material, coding classes, anchors, test conditions and parameters, submission requirements, subjective viewing requirements, test sites and delivery of test material, testing fee, source code and IPR, and contact information.

In the meantime, all details can be discussed within the so-called Ad-hoc Group (AhG) on 3D Video Coding (3DVC) which is available at mpeg-ftv@lists.rwth-aachen.de (to subscribe or unsubscribe, go to http://mailman.rwth-aachen.de/mailman/listinfo/mpeg-ftv).

The Future Media Internet and other related topics

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:49:00 +0000

Recently, the IEEE Communication Magazine had a special issue on Future Media Internet which I'd like to review very briefly. First, let's start with titles of the papers from this issue:

From this issue it seems that the Future Media Internet (FMI) is built around the concept of Content-Centric Networking (CCN) or Content-Oriented Networking (CON) - cf. articles #1 and #2 - whereby the latter is referred to as a umbrella term including CCN and others like Data-Oriented Network Architecture (DONA) and Publish-Subscribe Internetworking Routing Paradigm (PSIRP). Probably in this context also the Content-Aware Networking (CAN) approach developed within the ALICANTE project is worth to be mentioned.

Furthermore, it seems that Peer-to-Peer (P2P), Scalable Video Coding (SVC), and Quality of Experience (QoE) - cf. articles #3 and #4 - are very much important for the FMI. While I believe that SVC has some advantages in the context of P2P, I have some doubts about a close co-operation between applications and ISPs unless the applications are offered by the same ISPs. Interestingly, the P2P-Next project and the QUALINET COST action are both working on these topics.

Finally, article #5 proposes a system architecture for enriched semantic personalized search and retrieval and article #3 seems to be an application paper describing the automatic creation of 3D environments from a single sketch in the context of FMI.

In its most recent issue, the IEEE Communication Magazine again had some interesting papers related to the FMI. The special issue on Recent Advances in IETF Standards had three articles worth mentioning in the context of FMI:

The Coming Age of MPLS provides a tutorial on MPLS-TP and its usage.
Stream Control Transmission Protocol: Past, Current, and Future Standardization Activities describes SCTP and already defined extensions as well as future work in the area of security and concurrent multi-path transport.
Internet Geolocation and Location-based Services describing the IETF GEOPRIV architecture.

Next to that, two papers accepted from the open call are very relevant to FMI, namely QoX: What is it really? and Mobile Video Delivery with HTTP. Again, the QoE is a topic but the first time HTTP streaming is mentioned in this context. It's already heavily deployed, we all use it but in most cases the quality is unsatisfactory (even if one pays for such a service).

Thus, I would like to see more papers regarding QoE for HTTP streaming in the context of the Future Media Internet!

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM - TOMCCAP)

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:09:00 +0000

Call for Proposals - Special Issue

Deadline for Proposal Submission: May, 31th 2011

Notification: June, 10th 2011

http://tomccap.acm.org/

ACM - TOMCCAP is one of the world's leading journals on multimedia. As in previous years we are planning to publish a special issue in 2012. Proposals are accepted until May, 31th 2011. Each special issue is the responsibility of guest editors. If you wish to guest edit a special issue you should prepare a proposal as outlined below, then send this via e-mail to EiC Ralf Steinmetz (steinmetz.eic@kom.tu-darmstadt.de)

Proposals should:

Cover a current or emerging topic in the area of multimedia computing, communications and applications;
Set out the importance of the special issue's topic in that area;
Give a strategy for the recruitment of high quality papers;
Indicate a draft time-scale in which the special issue could be produced (paper writing, reviewing, and submission of final copies to TOMCCAP), assuming the proposal is accepted.

Unlike the years before, the special issue will be published as online-only issue in the ACM Digital Library. This gives the guest editors higher flexibility in the review process and the number of papers to be accepted, while yet ensuring a timely publication. A notification of acceptance for the proposals will be given until June, 10th 2011. Once a proposal is accepted we will contact you to discuss the further process.

For questions please contact:

Ralf Steinmetz - Editor in Chief (steinmetz.eic@kom.tu-darmstadt.de)
Lasse Lehmann - Information Director (lasse.lehmann@kom.tu-darmstadt.de)

MPEG Internet Video Coding

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 22:15:00 +0000

At its 96th meeting, MPEG issued two document in the area of Internet video coding which are publicly available:

Draft Call for Proposals (CfP) for Internet Video Coding Technologies

The draft CfP comprises requirements for a proposal (i.e., on the actual submission), information on the evaluation, source code & IPR details, and the timeline. In particular, the aim of this work item is to address the diversified needs of the Internet:

To satisfy the requirements of this application domain MPEG will evaluate the submissions and will develop a specification (the Standard) that MPEG expects shall include a profile qualified as a “Option-1 licensing” and may include other profiles.

The timeline for the Call for Proposal is as follows:

Draft Call-for-Proposals ready: 2011/03
Final Call-for-Proposals issued: 2011/07
Proposals received and evaluation starts: 2011/10

Option-1 Codec specification development plan:

Committee Draft: 2012/07
Draft International Standard: 2013/01
Final Draft International Standard: 2013/07

Requirements for Internet Video Coding Technologies

Requirements fall into the following major categories:

IPR requirements
Technical requirements
Implementation complexity requirements

Interestingly, the standard shall provide better compression performance than MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to AVC baseline profile. The resolution shall be from QVGA to HD and various color spaces, color sampling, and bit-depth coding shall be supported. Other technical requirements include (the usual ones) high perceptual quality, random access, support for trick modes, network friendliness, error resilience, video buffer management, bitstream scalability, transcoding, and overlay channel. Finally, the implementation complexity shall allow for real-time encoding and decoding on both stationary and mobile devices.

Audio for High Efficiency Video Coding

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:48:00 +0000

--Document available here.

At the 92nd meeting, April 2010, MPEG evaluated the Call for Proposals for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and launched this new work item. It is envisioned that HEVC will specify video coding for devices whose capabilities are beyond those of current HD displays. These might be Ultra-HD (UHD) devices, such as 4K x 2K displays. In such UHD displays, a much closer viewing distance is feasible and perhaps desirable. At such viewing distances there is both visual and audio envelopment. This could have significant impact on audio presentation such that much more accurate sound localization in terms of direction and distance is desirable. If there is only one viewer, it might be that aspects of the audio presentation might be individualized in some meaningful way.

This document describes application scenarios (i.e., home cinema, personal 3D video TV, multi-channel audio programs, real-time communication, mobile streaming, streaming/storage/download, 3D video or telepresence), possible requirements (i.e., on high quality, localization and envelopment, compression, flexible loudspeaker placement, downmix and rendering, complexity, interactivity), possible relevant technologies (ranging from MPEG-D Unified Speech and Audio Coding to MPEG-4 AAC-ELD and MPEG Surround among others), and, finally, some open issues (i.e., what subjective evaluation method is appropriate for this work?).

MPEG issues call for proposals for visual search

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:23:00 +0000

Highlights of the 96th Meeting

MPEG finalizes CfP to standardize mobile visual search technologies

In its latest step toward creating a standard for efficient and interoperable designs of visual search applications, MPEG has issued a Call for Proposals at its 96th meeting. Like a barcode reader, but using regular images instead of barcodes, visual search enables the retrieval of related information from databases for tourists, simplified shopping, mobile augmented reality, and other applications by sending standardized descriptors.

Specifically, the call seeks technologies that deliver robust matching of images of objects, such as landmarks, artworks, and text-based documents, that may be partially occluded or captured from various vantage points, and with different camera parameters, or lighting conditions. The underlying component technologies that are expected to be addressed by the standard include the format of the visual descriptors, and parts of the descriptor extraction process needed to ensure interoperability. Other component technologies, such as indexing and matching algorithms, may also be incorporated into the new standard.

The text of the Call for Proposals is available here. Responses are due shortly before and will be evaluated at the 98th MPEG meeting in Geneva.

MPEG plans April 18 CfP for 3D video coding

A Call for Proposals on 3D Video Coding Technology is planned to be issued by MPEG. This call invites technology submissions providing efficient compression of 3D video and high quality view reconstruction that goes beyond the capabilities of existing standards. MPEG has already delivered 3D compression formats to the market, including MVC and frame-compatible stereoscopic formats, which are being deployed by industry for packaged media and broadcast services. However, the market needs are expected to evolve and new types of 3D displays and services will be offered. With this call, MPEG embarks on a new phase of 3D standardization that anticipates these future needs. The next-generation of 3D standards will define the 3D data format and associated compression technology to facilitate the generation of multiview output to enable both advanced stereoscopic display processing and improved support for auto-stereoscopic displays. Further details are outlined in MPEG's Vision on 3D Video, which is available online at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/visions/3dv/index.htm.

The text of the Call for Proposals will be available here. Responses to this call are due in September 2011 and will be evaluated at the 98th MPEG meeting in Geneva.

MPEG continues with CfP for Type-1 Video Coding Standard

As announced in January, MPEG will develop a new video compression standard in line with the expected usage models of the Internet. The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG issued a Draft Call for Proposals (CfP) for Internet Video Coding Technologies that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC “Type-1 licensing”, i.e. intended to be “royalty free”. Proposals are due in October 2011 and will be evaluated at the 98th MPEG meeting in Geneva. It is expected that this standard will become the default video codec for internet applications.

The text of the Call for Proposals is available here. Responses to this call are due in October 2011 and will be evaluated at the 98th MPEG meeting in Geneva.

MPEG augments its reconfigurable framework with graphics

At its 96th meeting, MPEG has decided to extend the set of tools available in ISO/IEC 23001-4 and ISO/IEC 23002-4 used to describe a RVC (Reconfigurable Video Coding) framework, to now include graphics specific elements. Therefore, what was previously envisioned as RVC is now RMC (Reconfigurable Multimedia Coding), the latter containing both the already standardized VTL (Video Tool Library) and the library currently being developed for graphics, GTL (Graphics Tool Library). The purpose of GTL is to specify the Functional Units for the compression of static and animated 3D graphic objects and to allow their configuration to build reconfigurable decoders.

Digging Deeper – How to Contact MPEG

Communicating the large and sometimes complex array of technology that the MPEG Committee has developed is not a simple task. Experts, past and present, have contributed a series of tutorials and vision documents that explain each of these standards individually. The repository is growing with each meeting, so if something you are interested is not there yet, it may appear there shortly – but you should also not hesitate to request it. You can start your MPEG adventure at: http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/technologies.htm.

Further Information

Future MPEG meetings are planned as follows:

No. 97, Torino, IT, 18-22 July, 2011
No. 98, Geneva, CH 28 November – 2 December, 2011
No. 99, San Jose, USA 6-10 February, 2012
For further information about MPEG, please contact:

Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione (Convener of MPEG, Italy)
Via Borgionera, 103
10040 Villar Dora (TO), Italy
Tel: +39 011 935 04 61
leonardo@chiariglione.org
This press release and other MPEG-related information can be found on the MPEG homepage:

http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/

The text and details related current Calls are in the Hot News section, http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/hot_news.htm. These documents include information on how to respond to Calls.

The MPEG homepage also has links to other MPEG pages which are maintained by the MPEG subgroups. It also contains links to public documents that are freely available for download by those who are not MPEG members. Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases by email should contact Dr. Arianne T. Hinds at arianne.hinds@infoprint.com.

3rd International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX)

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 09:59:00 +0000

Submission deadline extended: March 28, 2011

Call for papers

September 7-9, 2011, Mechelen, Belgium

http://www.qomex.org/

CfP: PDF

The third International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX) will bring together leading professionals and scientists who are developing methods for evaluating multimedia quality and user experience.

Typically, multimedia processing algorithms are evaluated using objective metrics or through subjective testing in a controlled environment. However, perceived user experience is psychological in nature and changes in different environmental and social conditions and with different multimedia devices. Therefore, new techniques are needed to assess and enhance multimedia experience from the user perspective. QoMEX is an international forum to gather experts from academia and industry to present the latest developments on evaluation of multimedia quality based on user experience.
QoMEX’11 features oral presentations, exhibits, panels and poster sessions in order to provide attendees with various channels to exchange and acquire information about the latest developments and future trends in the field of multimedia user experience.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

User Experience Assessment and Enhancement: New metrics/measurements to define quality of user experience, interaction between auditory, visual, affective and other modalities and their impact on user experience, user interface design, capturing, modeling and (re)presentation of user experience data, human and multimedia device interaction, multimedia quality evaluation tools for generic and specific applications.

Visual User Experience (Image/Video/Graphics): Objective quality metrics, subjective quality evaluation, psycho-visual modeling, quality-centered processing, compression and transmission, artifacts reduction, relationship between errors/noise/losses and human perception, display-specific processing, visual saliency, 3D Video, quality evaluation in HD and beyond, quality evaluation for HDR content, quality issues in streaming video.

Auditory User Experience (Speech/Audio): Psycho-acoustic modeling, quality assessment of interactive speech and non-speech applications, intrusive/non-intrusive models for quality evaluation.
QoE for virtual, augmented and mixed realities: 3D audio, 3D video and multimodal representation, immersiveness, embodied interaction, haptic interaction, other modalities.

Link between QoS, QoE and Acceptance: Innovation management based on QoS and QoE, business models, value of QoE, relationship between QoE and price.

Psychological and sociological dimension of QoE: Physiological and neurotechnological measurement techniques, modality concepts and modality interaction, interaction and communication, semantics, user groups.

Standardization Activities in Multimedia Quality Evaluation: Subjective evaluation methods, benchmarking efforts, databases and multimedia content characteristics, testing conditions, new objective metrics and models for upcoming standards, terminology definitions.

Examples of applications include VoIP, Video conferences/Tele-presence/Video chats, Virtual/mixed reality for games, education, training, arts …

Important Dates

Submission deadline extended: March 28, 2011
Notification of acceptance: May 29, 2011
Camera ready submission: June 19, 2011

Beta Version of VLC DASH Plugin

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 10:07:00 +0000

The first version (beta) of our implementation of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) as VLC plugin is available under the URL: http://www-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/dash/.

The current version of the plugin supports:

Single profile as defined in the documentation section: Profiles of DASH are defined so as to enable interoperability and the signaling of the use of features etc. A profile has an identifier and refers to a set of specific restrictions. The profiles with which a MPD complies are indicated in the MPD@profiles attribute.
Different adaptation logics: An adaptation logic is a logic that selects the next segment or part of a segment that should be downloaded. With the current design it should be very easy to implement and test new logics for research purposes.
Single/Multiple periods per media presentation: But I recommend to use just single periods due to the beta state of the plugin.
ISO Base Media File Format segments
The mpd profiles attribute must be set to “urn:mpeg:mpegB:profile:dash:isoff-basic-on-demand:cm”

Test-Content and sample MPDs are located at the Download-Section. Videos of the plugin were you can see DASH in action and some other versions of the plugin that support the CMP layer and session transfer using MPEG-21 could be found here. Documentation about the supported profile and how to build VLC with DASH as well as a class diagram could be found on the Documentation-Section.

Call for Adaptation Logic

We are seeking for efficient implementations of the actual adaptation logic which is responsible for the dynamic and adaptive part of DASH (see also above). Therefore, we offer IAdaptationLogic interfaces as well as the AbstractAdaptationLogic which shall be extended for this purpose. Very simple implementations are provided and we're seeking for more sophisticated onces. Please help us improving this implementation, ideally by contributing (pseudo) code.

Workshop on Multimedia-Aware Networking 2011 (WoMAN'11)

noreply@blogger.com (Christian Timmerer) — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:24:00 +0000

Deadline extensions: March 07, 2011

--co-located with ICME2011, July 11-15, 2011, Barcelona, Spain

Call for Papers

Web: http://woman2011.ict-alicante.eu/ [PDF] [TXT]

Workshop organizers: Christian Timmerer (Klagenfurt University, Austria), Daniel Negru (LaBRI, France), Eugen Borcoci (UPB, Romania), George Xilouris (Demokritos, Greece)

Latest advances in multimedia content encoding and representation, including HDTV, 3DTV, multi-view video and associated added-value interactive services, are offering to the end user a truly rich multimedia experience. At the same time advances in communications systems and network technologies give the ability to apply in-network processing techniques in order to take advantage of the available user and media contextual information for efficient, flexible and auto-configurable media transmission. On the other hand network-aware applications and cross-layer mechanisms are being developed in order to take advantage of network information in order to adapt the media to the current network conditions, terminal capabilities, and user preferences.

This workshop solicits novel contributions and breaking results on all aspects of multimedia-aware networking. In particular, workshop papers should describe algorithms, issues and experiences related to content-aware networking and network-aware applications, future (media) Internet architectures, self-* and adaptivity, cross-layer design and optimization, applications, and interoperability.

We are particularly interested in (but not limited to) areas such as:

Content Aware Networking and Network Aware Applications

Content creation: coding (e.g., 2D/3D, SVC, HEVC), preparation, packaging
Content delivery: transport, streaming, live, on-demand, real-time, download
Content adaptation: server, in-network, client
Content-aware and media-aware forwarding and routing
Content consumption: widget

Context Aware Applications and Networks

Future Internet architectures
Content/media centric aspects
Network/infrastructure management
Network virtualization
Cross-layer design, cross-layer optimization

Self-* and adaptivity

Self-organization
Self-configuration
Self-healing

Interoperability: standardization

High-Efficiency Video Coding
3D Video Coding
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP
Modern Media Transport

The papers of WoMAN’11 will be published within the proceedings of ICME’11 and, thus, must be formatted according to the author guidelines of ICME’11 (see http://www.icme2011.org/ for details). Accepted papers will be also available through IEEE Xplore™.

Best paper awards
The best paper awards are sponsored by Dolby and RADVISION respectively.

Contact: Christian Timmerer, christian(dot)timmerer(at)itec(dot)uni-klu(dot)ac(dot)at, http://twitter.com/timse7