The MPEG-4 Book


Book Description

In this book, two leaders of the MPEG-4 standards community offer an in-depth, targeted guide to the MPEG-4 standard and its use in real, cutting-edge applications. The authors demonstrate how MPEG-4 addresses the rapidly evolving needs of telecommunications, broadcast, interactive, and converged applications more successfully than any previous standard.




Scalable Continuous Media Streaming Systems


Book Description

Continuous media streaming systems will shape the future of information infrastructure. The challenge is to design systems and networks capable of supporting millions of concurrent users. Key to this is the integration of fault-tolerant mechanisms to prevent individual component failures from disrupting systems operations. These are just some of the hurdles that need to be overcome before large-scale continuous media services such as video-on-demand can be deployed with maximum efficiency. The author places the subject in context, drawing together findings from the past decade of research whilst examining the technology’s present status and its future potential. The approach adopted is comprehensive, covering topics – notably the scalability and fault-tolerance issues - that previously have not been treated in depth. Provides an accessible introduction to the technology, presenting the basic principles for media streaming system design, focusing on the need for the correct and timely delivery of data. Explores the use of parallel server architectures to tackle the two key challenges of scalability and fault-tolerance. Investigates the use of network multicast streaming algorithms to further increase the scalability of very-large-scale media streaming systems. Illustrates all findings using real-world examples and case studies gleaned from cutting-edge worldwide research. Combining theory and practice, this book will appeal to industry specialists working in content distribution in general and continuous media streaming in particular. The introductory materials and basic building blocks complemented by amply illustrated, more advanced coverage provide essential reading for senior undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in these fields.




Visual Media Coding and Transmission


Book Description

This book presents the state-of-the-art in visual media coding and transmission Visual Media Coding and Transmission is an output of VISNET II NoE, which is an EC IST-FP6 collaborative research project by twelve esteemed institutions from across Europe in the fields of networked audiovisual systems and home platforms. The authors provide information that will be essential for the future study and development of visual media communications technologies. The book contains details of video coding principles, which lead to advanced video coding developments in the form of Scalable Coding, Distributed Video Coding, Non-Normative Video Coding Tools and Transform Based Multi-View Coding. Having detailed the latest work in Visual Media Coding, networking aspects of Video Communication is detailed. Various Wireless Channel Models are presented to form the basis for both link level quality of service (QoS) and cross network transmission of compressed visual data. Finally, Context-Based Visual Media Content Adaptation is discussed with some examples. Key Features: Contains the latest advances in this important field covered by VISNET II NoE Addresses the latest multimedia signal processing and coding algorithms Covers all important advance video coding techniques, scalable and multiple description coding, distributed video coding and non-normative tools Discusses visual media networking with various wireless channel models QoS methods by way of link adaptation techniques are detailed with examples Presents a visual media content adaptation platform, which is both context aware and digital rights management enabled Contains contributions from highly respected academic and industrial organizations Visual Media Coding and Transmission will benefit researchers and engineers in the wireless communications and signal processing fields. It will also be of interest to graduate and PhD students on media processing, coding and communications courses.




An Introduction to the DLNA Architecture


Book Description

This book describes the architecture and protocols for interconnecting media devices in home networks. The architecture and protocols described in this book have been developed during the last 10 years by R&D teams from several companies working jointly in two industry organizations known as UPnP and DLNA. This book mainly deals with the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) protocol. This text is especially relevant for the design and development of smart homes, where media devices, communication devices, appliances, and sensors are all integrated in an intelligent network.




Multimedia Systems, Standards, and Networks


Book Description

Describes ITU H H.323 and H.324, H.263, ITU-T video, and MPEG-4 standards, systems, and coding; IP and ATM networks; multimedia search and retrieval; image retrieval in digital laboratories; and the status and direction of MPEG-7.




Coding Video


Book Description

A fully up-to-date guide to transformative consumer technologies Video compression – or video coding – has been at the centre of a revolution in the way video is produced, delivered, and consumed. It has made the switch from analogue to digital video possible and has enabled fundamental shifts in the way we now watch video. New video compression standards, together with adaptive streaming protocols, are used to deliver high-quality video to homes and workplaces around the world. Coding Video provides a practical and comprehensive guide to the new landscape of video coding and video streaming. This book explains the core technologies with a wealth of practical examples and illustrations, covers key standards such as H.265/HEVC and includes an introduction to the new H.266/VVC standard. Coding Video will appeal to engineers, application developers, product designers and digital video professionals, as well as to graduate students and researchers in Engineering, Computer Science and related subjects.




Video coding standards


Book Description

The requirements for multimedia (especially video and audio) communications increase rapidly in the last two decades in broad areas such as television, entertainment, interactive services, telecommunications, conference, medicine, security, business, traffic, defense and banking. Video and audio coding standards play most important roles in multimedia communications. In order to meet these requirements, series of video and audio coding standards have been developed such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-21 for audio and video by ISO/IEC, H.26x for video and G.72x for audio by ITU-T, Video Coder 1 (VC-1) for video by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and RealVideo (RV) 9 for video by Real Networks. AVS China is the abbreviation for Audio Video Coding Standard of China. This new standard includes four main technical areas, which are systems, video, audio and digital copyright management (DRM), and some supporting documents such as consistency verification. The second part of the standard known as AVS1-P2 (Video - Jizhun) was approved as the national standard of China in 2006, and several final drafts of the standard have been completed, including AVS1-P1 (System - Broadcast), AVS1-P2 (Video - Zengqiang), AVS1-P3 (Audio - Double track), AVS1-P3 (Audio - 5.1), AVS1-P7 (Mobile Video), AVS-S-P2 (Video) and AVS-S-P3 (Audio). AVS China provides a technical solution for many applications such as digital broadcasting (SDTV and HDTV), high-density storage media, Internet streaming media, and will be used in the domestic IPTV, satellite and possibly the cable TV market. Comparing with other coding standards such as H.264 AVC, the advantages of AVS video standard include similar performance, lower complexity, lower implementation cost and licensing fees. This standard has attracted great deal of attention from industries related to television, multimedia communications and even chip manufacturing from around the world. Also many well known companies have joined the AVS Group to be Full Members or Observing Members. The 163 members of AVS Group include Texas Instruments (TI) Co., Agilent Technologies Co. Ltd., Envivio Inc., NDS, Philips Research East Asia, Aisino Corporation, LG, Alcatel Shanghai Bell Co. Ltd., Nokia (China) Investment (NCIC) Co. Ltd., Sony (China) Ltd., and Toshiba (China) Co. Ltd. as well as some high level universities in China. Thus there is a pressing need from the instructors, students, and engineers for a book dealing with the topic of AVS China and its performance comparisons with similar standards such as H.264, VC-1 and RV-9.




Evolutionary Trends of the Internet


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Thyrrhenian International Workshop on Digital Communication, IWDC 2001, held in Taormina, Italy in September 2001. The 46 revised full papers presented are a mix of invited papers and selected submitted papers and reflect the state of the art in multiservice IP network research and development. The book offers topical sections on WDM technologies for the next generation Internet, mobile and wireless Internet access, QoS in the next generation Internet, multicast and routing in IP networks, mulitmedia services over the Internet, performance of Internet protocols, dynamic service management, and source encoding and Internet applications.




Perceptual Digital Imaging


Book Description

Visual perception is a complex process requiring interaction between the receptors in the eye that sense the stimulus and the neural system and the brain that are responsible for communicating and interpreting the sensed visual information. This process involves several physical, neural, and cognitive phenomena whose understanding is essential to design effective and computationally efficient imaging solutions. Building on advances in computer vision, image and video processing, neuroscience, and information engineering, perceptual digital imaging greatly enhances the capabilities of traditional imaging methods. Filling a gap in the literature, Perceptual Digital Imaging: Methods and Applications comprehensively covers the system design, implementation, and application aspects of this emerging specialized area. It gives readers a strong, fundamental understanding of theory and methods, providing a foundation on which solutions for many of the most interesting and challenging imaging problems can be built. The book features contributions by renowned experts who present the state of the art and recent trends in image acquisition, processing, storage, display, and visual quality evaluation. They detail advances in the field and explore human visual system-driven approaches across a broad spectrum of applications, including: Image quality and aesthetics assessment Digital camera imaging White balancing and color enhancement Thumbnail generation Image restoration Super-resolution imaging Digital halftoning and dithering Color feature extraction Semantic multimedia analysis and processing Video shot characterization Image and video encryption Display quality enhancement This is a valuable resource for readers who want to design and implement more effective solutions for cutting-edge digital imaging, computer vision, and multimedia applications. Suitable as a graduate-level textbook or stand-alone reference for researchers and practitioners, it provides a unique overview of an important and rapidly developing research field.




The MPEG Representation of Digital Media


Book Description

More and more information, audio and video but also a range of other information type, is generated, processed and used by machines today, even though the end user may be a human. The result over the past 15 years has been a substantial increase in the type of information and change in the way humans generate, classify, store, search, access and consume information. Conversion of information to digital form is a prerequisite for this enhanced machine role, but must be done having in mind requirements such as compactness, fidelity, interpretability etc. This book presents new ways of dealing with digital information and new types of digital information underpinning the evolution of society and business.