Past Projects

VISNET-II:

VISNET II builds on the success and achievements of the VISNET NoE to continue the progress towards achieving the NoE mission of creating a sustainable world force in Networked Audiovisual (AV) Media Technologies. VISNET II is a network of excellence with a clear vision for integration, research and dissemination plans. The research activities within VISNET II will cover 3 major thematic areas related to networked 2D/3D AV systems and home platforms. These are:

VISNET II brings together 12 leading European organisations in the field of Networked Audiovisual Media Technologies. The consortium consists of organisations known for their proven track record as well as both national and international reputations in audiovisual information technologies. VISNET II integrates a number of researchers who have made significant contributions to the advance of this field of technology through standardisation activities, international publications, conferences and workshops activities, patents as well as many other prestigious achievements. The 12 integrated organisations represent 7 European states spanning across a major part of Europe, thereby promising the efficient dissemination of resulting technological development and exploitation to larger communities.

DISCOVER:

Over the past decade several video coding technologies have emerged to achieve great commercial success and it is widely expected that digital video systems will completely replace all existing traditional analogue based video systems during the next decade. DISCOVER will address the development of several advanced digital video coding technologies which are very likely to represent a breakthrough in new video coding application scenarios. Until now video coding research and standardization have been adopting a video coding paradigm where it is the task of the encoder to explore the source statistics, leading to a complexity balance where complex encoders interact with simpler decoders. This paradigm is strongly dominated and determined by applications such as broadcasting, video on demand, and video streaming. Distributed Video Coding (DVC) adopts a completely different coding paradigm by giving the decoder the task to exploit - partly or wholly - the source statistics to achieve efficient compression. This change of paradigm also moves the encoder-decoder complexity balance, allowing the provision of efficient compression solutions with simple encoders and complex decoders. This new coding paradigm, never considered by any video coding standard, is particularly adequate to emerging applications such as wireless video cameras and wireless low-power surveillance networks, disposable video cameras, certain medical applications, sensor networks, multi-view image acquisition, networked camcorders, etc., where low complexity encoders are a must because memory, computational power, and energy are scarce. The objective of DISCOVER is to explore and propose new video coding schemes and tools in the area of Distributed Video Coding with a strong potential for new applications, targeting new advances in coding efficiency, error resiliency, scalability, and model based-video coding thus paving the way for a breakthrough regarding the next video coding generation.

VISION:

VISION, coordinated by Telefónica I+D is one CENIT project founded by the spanish government. This project brings together the most important R+D companies, and research groups of SPAIN. The objective of VISION is the development of the the new generation of teleinmersive systems that could provide the users a true sensation of presence in their daily communications. This will lead to new possibilities in the social relationships of people separated by huge physical distances.

The research activities within VISION will cover several areas:

CYCIT-DVC:

This spanish project aims to explore and propose new coding schemes in the field of distributed video. One important aspect is to study the viability of DVC for two particular applications: The transmission of video in mobile scenarios and the compression of signals in videosensors networks. In both scenarios DVC algorithms will be developed and compared with standard video coding schemes in terms of computational complexity, coding efficiency and robustness towards channel errors.

VISNET:

The VISNET project aims to create a sustainable world force of leading research groups in the field of networked audiovisual (AV) media technologies applied to home platforms. The member institutions have grouped together to set a network of excellence with a clear vision for integration, research and dissemination plans. The research activities within VISNET will cover several disciplines related to networked AV systems and home platforms. These are:

MORPHECO: Morphological Codec for Storage and Transmission

The emergence of new visual communications systems and the constant need for bandwidth savings, indicate that there is a need for more efficient compression schemes that should provide very high compression rates while retaining image quality. The objective of this project is therefore to investigate, develop, and demonstrate morphological source coding techniques for visual data and to propose a new coding/decoding scheme for still and moving images.

MAVT: The Mobile Audio-Visual Terminal

The key goal of MAVT is the creation of powerful video and audio coding schemes to transmit multimedia services in a mobile environment and implement them on a demonstrator. User requirements, network and channel-characteristics, service definitions and a general terminal architecture will be studied. MAVT will deliver future coding algorithms for low bitrate video (px8 kbit/s) and audio, and a futuristic terminal. Real time transmission of moving video in a DECT environment will be demonstrated as well as audio-visual data transmission in a UMTS environment by connecting the demonstrator to the testbeds of ATDMA and CODIT.

Another main goal of the MAVT project is to develop a joint European proposal for the MPEG-4 coding standard. MAVT will contribute to ETSI SMG 5 group by providing a reference model for mobile audio-visual data transmission.

MOMUSYS: MObile MUltimedia SYStems

The main objective of the project Mobile Multimedia Systems (MoMuSys) is to develop and validate the technology to deploy new and improved audio-visual applications supporting new functionalities, such as content interactivity, content scalability and content based access. These should be based on efficient compression algorithms allowing robustness against transmission errors, thus suited especially for mobile multimedia systems. Such functionalities have been identified in the context of MPEG-4, which should become the standard for coding of audio-visual information in advanced multimedia systems. Most of these functionalities were either not or insufficiently supported by so far available standards.

VIDAS: Video and Audio assisted coding

The objective of the VIDAS (Video Assisted with Audio Coding and Representation) project is to approach the problem of videophone coding from and audio-video joint point of view, both for the analysis and for the synthesis. The motivating idea is that interpersonal audio-video communication represents an easily modelable information source, characterized in audio by a human speaker's voice and in video by the same speaker's face. Two demonstrators will be provided: i) a hardware platform with H324 coder/decoder integrated with a board for speech analysis and articulatory estimation, lip extraction and tracking and with audio assisted frame interpolation for increasing the frame frequency; ii) a software demonstrator of a hybrid coding scheme compliant with MPEG4-SNHC where speech analysis is used for applying suitable deformations onto the modelable component of the scene.

AFFIRM: The objective of the AFFIRM project ( Autonomous Forest Fire detection and prevention aid system Integrating Remote Multisensor terminals) is the development and demonstration of a low cost system system providing global solutions for risk evaluation along with early and reliable wild fire detection in rural environment. In particular AFFIRM aims at the development of an autonomous fire detection system made up by a certain number of remote terminals disseminated in a forest area and linked to a central operations center through a satellite communication link. A prototype will be built showing the capabilities of smoke detection, image transmission, satellite digital communications and case base reasoning.

HYPERMEDIA: Continuous Audio-visual market in Europe

The main objective of HYPERMEDIA is to provide an experience on continuous multimedia material (audiovisual) handling and delivery in a hypermedia service environment, allowing the user to navigate in the hyperspace through databases belonging to actors of the service chain.

MASCOT: Distributed Metadata for Advanced Scalable Video Coding Tools

The explosion of multimedia applications leads to a great expansion of video transmission over heterogeneous channels such as Internet, mobile nets and In-Home Digital Networks with new issues in terms of varying transport conditions (e.g., bandwidth, error rate) and receiver capabilities (CPU, display). In the future the Internet is expected to become the major carrier for all forms of audio-visual information and data. The requirements for bandwidth availability and quick and easy access to large multimedia databases will be more and more stringent. However new techniques are required to overcome the limitation of current coding techniques and to enable a quick and easy access to large multimedia data repositories. In this context, the main goal of MASCOT is to bring a breakthrough in video coding and access through the exploitation of two innovative techniques:

1. New decompositions enabling scalable compression.
2. Use of metadata information to improve coding.

P-AVIDA: Within the framework of the PI-AVIda project, which is promoted by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the redevelopment and further development of segmentation and classification proceedings of multimedia data streams is encouraged for their use in portal applications.