A Resource Reservation Scheme for Synchronized Distributed Multimedia Sessions

Guarantees of services in a networked environment are provided by the proper allocation and scheduling of network and system resources. A lot of research in packet scheduling, QoS routing, traffic multiplexing, etc. has been aimed at providing deterministic or statistical service guarantees, while utilizing resources efficiently. In this paper, we propose a resource reservation scheme for a class of multimedia presentations. We characterize this class of multimedia presentations as synchronized distributed multimedia sessions, which we believe are important components of many multimedia applications. In addition to multimedia presentations, the reservation scheme applies to applications with synchronized resource requirements. Based on resource inquiry and interval analysis, the scheme is also able to find feasible resource allocation schedules for resource reservation requests. Built upon a layer of resource abstraction, the scheme suits well with today's heterogeneous network environment.     

An intelligent memory caching architecture for data-intensive multimedia applications

With the rapid developments in cloud computing and mobile networks, multimedia content can be accessed conveniently. Recently, some novel intelligent caching-based approaches have been proposed to improve the memory architectures for multimedia applications. These applications often face bottleneck related challenges which result in performance degradation and service delay issues. Intelligent multimedia network applications access the shared data by using a specific network file system. This results in answering the processing related constraints on hard-drive storage and might result in bringing bottleneck issues. Therefore, to improve the performance of these multimedia network applications, we present an intelligent distributed memory caching system. We integrate the multimedia application message passing interface in a multi-threaded environment and propose an algorithm which can handle concurrent response behavior for different multimedia applications. Results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms traditional approaches in terms of throughput and file read access features.

     

A Scalable Toolkit for Designing Multimedia Authoring Environments

This paper introduces Kaomi, a scalable toolkit for designing authoring environments of multimedia documents. The underlying concept is to provide the designer of multimedia applications with a fast method to get an authoring system based on a set of synchronized views (the presentation view for displaying the document, the scenario view for showing the temporal organization of the document, ...) so that each view is the support of editing actions. Kaomi is flexible enough to support a variety of multimedia documents declarative formats. It is indeed a scalable toolkit since it provides facilities for extending and/or for modifying the resulting authoring environment. In addition, cross-platform portability is provided which allows operation in the heterogenous Internet environment. The use of Kaomi is mainly described through the design of two authoring environments: one for authoring a sub-set of the Smil standard of the W3C and the other one for Madeus, a constraint based multimedia language.     

A User Perspective of Quality of Service in m-Commerce

In an m-commerce setting, the underlying communication system will have to provide a Quality of Service (QoS) in the presence of two competing factors—network bandwidth and, as the pressure to add value to the business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experience by integrating multimedia applications grows, increasing data sizes. In this paper, developments in the area of QoS-dependent multimedia perceptual quality are reviewed and are integrated with recent work focusing on QoS for e-commerce. Based on previously identified user perceptual tolerance to varying multimedia QoS, we show that enhancing the m-commerce B2C user experience with multimedia, far from being an idealised scenario, is in fact feasible if perceptual considerations are employed.     

Multimedia mobile application e-commerce service satisfaction

Previous research on e-commerce through multimedia mobile applications primarily focused on the relationships between e-service factors and positive customer behavior. However, these studies did not consider the consumer purchasing decision process sufficiently to develop firms’ strategic priorities in the context of e-commerce services through multimedia mobile applications. To fill this gap, we conducted a choice-based conjoint analysis (CBCA) to identify the preferences for each attribute and the interaction effects between each pair of attributes related to the purchasing decision, and used an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) analysis to calculate the overall priorities for every sub-criterion and partial priorities for each main criterion. The main findings from the integrated CBCA and AHP are that consumers must be able to fulfill their most basic needs through multimedia mobile applications’ e-commerce service, e-commerce service providers using multimedia mobile applications should enhance their existing advantages to complement their shortcomings, and e-commerce service providers besides social commerce operators should change their business structures to adapt to the new e-commerce environment. We also discuss the main contributions and implications to improve e-commerce service satisfaction and strategic decision-making.

     

实时多媒体流同步机制的研究

实时多媒体流同步是网络环境下流媒体应用的基本要求和主要难点之一。文章介绍了多媒体同步的基本概念，分析了在IP网络环境下实时多媒体流在各个环节失去同步的原因，并针对这些原因提出了相应的解决方法。     

A Multimedia Constraint System1

The MADE constraint system provides excellent opportunities to introduce constraints in a multimedia application. Multimedia applications are not only a good place to experiment with constraint systems; constraints in a multimedia environment are almost indispensable. Due to the overwhelming amount of data and the number of relations between several parts of this data, multimedia applications almost demand the support of a constraint management system. The MADE constraint system combines the object oriented programming paradigm, inherited from the mC++ language, the declarative constraint programming paradigm and the special requirements imposed upon the constraint system by the multimedia environment. Among other things, the MADE constraint system provides parallel satisfaction techniques; several constraints may be solved simultaneously and this satisfaction process is performed in parallel with the application. This not only reduces the time needed to solve the constraints, it also allows the multimedia application to proceed with its presentation while (beneath the surface) the constraints are maintained. This not only holds for the parts of the presentation that are not constrained at all, but also for those parts that are. Furthermore, the constraint system is transparent to the multimedia application; no special coding or preparation of the objects in the application is necessary. Constraints can be added later to the application without much work. Besides that, it is also possible to add and remove constraints at runtime; objects may be constrained for only a period of the time the application is running.     

Seamless User-Level Handoff in Ubiquitous Multimedia Service Delivery

Advancing mobile computing technologies are enabling ubiquitous personal computing environment. In this paper, we focus on an important problem in such environment: user mobility. In the case of user mobility, a user is free to access his/her personalized service at anytime, anywhere, through any possible mobile/fixed devices. Providing mobility support in this scenario poses a series of challenges. The most essential problem is to preserve the user's access to the same service despite changes of the accessing host or service provider. Existing system-level mobility solutions are insufficient to address this issue since it is not aware of the application semantics. On the other hand, making each application to be mobility-aware will greatly increase the development overhead. We argue that the middleware layer is the best place to address this problem. On one hand, it is aware of application semantics. On the other hand, by building application-neutral mobility functions in the middleware layer, we eliminate the need to make each application mobility-aware. In this paper, we design a middleware framework to support user mobility in the ubiquitous computing environment. Its major mobility functions include user-level handoff management and service instantiation across heterogeneous computing platforms. We validate the major mobility functions using our prototype middleware system, and test them on two multimedia applications (Mobile Video Player and Mobile Audio Player). To maximally approximate the real-world user-mobility scenario, we have conducted experiments on a variety of computing platforms and communication paradigms, ranging from T1-connected high-end PC to handheld devices with wireless networks. The results show that our middleware framework is able to provide efficient user mobility support in the heterogeneous computing environment.     

CORE: a content-based retrieval engine for multimedia information systems

Rapid advances in multimedia technology necessitate the development of a generic multimedia information system with a powerful retrieval engine for prototyping multimedia applications. We develop a content-based retrieval engine (CORE) that makes use of novel indexing techniques for multimedia object retrieval. We formalize the concepts related to multimedia information systems such as multimedia objects and content-based retrieval. We bring out the requirements and challenges of a multimedia information system. The architecture of CORE is described in detail along with the associated retrieval mechanisms and indexing techniques. Various modules developed for efficient retrieval are presented with some APIs. The efficacy of CORE is demonstrated in the development of two multimedia systems, a computer-aided facial image inference and retrieval (CAFIIR) system and a system for trademark archival and retrieval (STAR), which have been developed at the Institute of Systems Science (ISS). We expect that CORE will be useful for effective prototyping of other such multimedia applications.Mainly supported by National Science & Technology Board of SingaporePartly working in Real World Computing Partnership, Novel Function Institute of Systems Science Laboratory since April 1994.     

Design and evaluation of a multimedia storage server for mixed traffic

The relative simplicity of access to digital communications nowadays and the simultaneous increase in the available bandwidth are leading to the definition of new telematic services, mainly oriented towards multimedia applications and interactivity with the user. In the near future, a decisive role will be played in this scenario by the providers of interactive multimedia services of the on-demand type, which will guarantee the end user a high degree of flexibility, speed and efficiency. In this paper, some of the technical aspects regarding these service providers are dealt with, paying particular attention to the problems of storing information and managing service requests. More specifically, the paper presents and evaluates a new storage technique based on the use of disk array technology, which can manage both typical multimedia connections and traditional requests. The proposed architecture is based on the joint use of the partial dynamic declustering and the information dispersal algorithm, which are employed for the allocation and retrieval of the data stored on the disk array. We also define efficient strategies for request management in such a way as to meet the time constraints imposed by multimedia sessions and guarantee good response times for the rest of the traffic. The system proposed is then analyzed using a simulation approach.     

Semantic processing of multimedia data for e-government applications

Knowledge management has become a challenge for almost all e-government applications where the efficient processing of large amounts of data is still a critical issue. In the last years, semantic techniques have been introduced to improve the full automatic digitalization process of documents, in order to facilitate the access to the information embedded in very large document repositories. In this paper, we present a novel model for multimedia digital documents aiming at improve effectiveness of digitalization activities within an information system supporting e-government organizations. At the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is one of the first attempts to give a single and unified characterization of multimedia documents managed by e-government applications, whereas semantic procedures and multimedia facilities are used for the transformation of unstructured documents into structured information. Furthermore, we define an architecture for the management of multimedia documents “life cycle”, which provides advanced functionalities for information extraction, semantic retrieval, indexing, storage, presentation, together with long-term preservation. Preliminary experiments concerning an e-health scenario are finally presented and discussed.     

ViMediaNet: an emulation system for interactive multimedia based telepresence services

The telepresence service (TPS) leverages advanced communication, virtual reality, and cooperative web technologies to provide remote engaged users an immersive experience of being fully present, which are widely used in teleconferencing, remote surgery, and hazardous environment exploration. The common feature of TPS-based applications lies in that the users’ experiences heavily depend on the quality of interactive multimedia services, that is, most deliveries of multimedia contents are mission-critical, as well as time-critical, to ensure the control and operation accuracy for telerobots. Therefore, the delivery performance of multimedia contents over heterogeneous networks becomes the primary concern in the TPS system design, especially for those delay sensitive applications, like remote surgery and environment exploration. In this paper, we incorporate video processing tools with the network simulator to design and implement a joint emulation system, named as the virtual media network (ViMediaNet), through which, the TPS designer can readily deploy the TPS system over a heterogeneous network virtualized by the network emulator, investigate the critical network performance metrics in the multimedia content delivery, such as transmission delay and packet jitter, and observe control results in real time. To verify the capability of ViMediaNet in emulating the real-setting TPS system, we take a mobile device based vision navigation system as an example to evaluate performance impacts of the rate adaptation technology in the telerobot control. The experimental results reveal that the adaptive video streaming is a promising solution to significantly enhance the control accuracy of telerobots in TPS systems.     

An Extended ANSI C for Processors with a Multimedia Extension

This paper presents the Multimedia C language, which is designed for the multimedia extensions included in all modern microprocessors. The paper discusses the language syntax, the implementation of its compiler and its use in developing multimedia applications. The goal was to provide programmers with the most natural way of using multimedia processing facilities in the C language. The MMC language has been used to develop some of the most frequently used multimedia kernels. The presented experiments on these scientific and multimedia applications have yielded good performance improvements.     

MIPAS: A neural network-based multimedia information processing and analysis system

This paper presents the structure and design criteria of a neural network-based multimedia information processing and analysis system (MIPAS) which can be used to deal with more-complicated intelligence issues. According to the structure and design criteria, a software environment (SEMIPAS), which supports the implementation of multimedia information (image + speech, image + characters, speech + characters, image + speech + characters) processing and analysis applications, is implemented and introduced. Under this software environment, a multimedia information processing and analysis system called “To Know the World” is constructed. Experiments show that the multimedia information processing and analysis is much more powerful and effective than single-medium information processing and analysis.     

Management of Multimedia Scenarios in an Object-Oriented Database System

In this paper, we present an approach to multimedia scenario management in a database system that considers : object-oriented concepts for multimedia and scenario modeling; both known and unknown multimedia object playing duration; temporal specification language; Petri net automatic generation based on temporal specifications; automatic detection of user temporal specification errors and contradictions; and finally user interactions based on composite Petri net features.     

Fast-path I/O architecture for high performance streaming server

In a disk-network scenario where expensive data transfers are the norm, such as in multimedia streaming applications, for example, a fast-path I/O architecture is generally considered to be “good practice.” Here, I/O performance can be improved through minimizing the number of in-memory data movements and context switches. In this paper, we report the results of the design and implementation of a high-performance streaming server using cheap hardware units assembled directly on a test card (i.e., NS card). The hardware part of our architecture is open to further reuse, extension, and integration with other applications even in the case of inexpensive and/or faster hardware. From the viewpoint of software-aided I/O, we offer Stream Disk Array (SDA) for scatter/gather-style block I/O, EXT3NS multimedia file system for large-scale file I/O, and interoperable streaming server for stream I/O.     

Modeling Reactive Multimedia: Events and Behaviors

This paper explores the idea of reactivity in multimedia, and proposes systems which can react to continuously-evolving behaviors as well as to more traditional discrete events. The idea is presented in a scenario as well as in a number of small programming examples.The illustrative examples are written in the Fran system. Fran provides a high-level programming model for animations, built in the Haskell functional programming language. Whilst we use Fran for illustration—and indeed we argue that the functional paradigm is a natural choice of host for such a system—we should stress that the notion of external behaviors within multimedia is independent of the programming environment chosen and could be incorporated into other systems such as SMIL.     

A generic model for Immersive Documentation Environments

We propose a generic model for designing systems relying on augmented reality techniques in the context of an Immersive Documentation Environment (IDE). This model encompasses a user/system interaction paradigm, system architecture and exploitation scenario. We illustrate the use of this model on several virtually documented environment systems providing the user with enhanced interaction capabilities. These systems are dedicated to several applications where the operator needs natural (hands free) access to information, to carry out measurements and/or operate on devices (e.g. maintenance, instruction). These systems merge live images acquired by a video camera with synthetic data (multimedia documents including CAD models and text) and present the result properly registered in the real world. Vocal commands as well as multimodal interaction, associating speech and gesture, are used to improve interaction.