Kohtaro Asai

MPEG-4/7-based Internet video and still-image browsing system

The ongoing MPEG-7 standard intends to provide a Multimedia Content Description Interface. In other words, it will provide a rich set of tools to describe content with a view to facilitating applications such as content based querying, browsing and searching of multimedia content. The MPEG-4 standard provides tools for compressing multimedia content at bitrates that are feasible with typical internet connections. Such bitrates fall significantly short of those supported by prior standards such as MPEG-i and MPEG-2. Thus, in this paper, we present a remote video and still image browsing system that uses MPEG-7 for the querying/browsing/searching and MPEG-4 for compressing any transmitted content. We use descriptors of features such as color, shape and motion to annotate the stored content with MPEG-7 like metadata. The aforementioned descriptors stem from our previous work and are currently in the working draft of the MPEG-7 standard. In our previous work, we have shown the efficacy of each of the descriptors individually. In this paper, we show how we combine some of the features to effectively browse remote video and still image content. Our emphasis is on accurate and quick browsing of the remote content. Our system consists of a video web server with stored MPEG-4 video/still content that is able to support remote requests through a simple browser interface. We have used a combination of cgi script and servletapplet based configurations. We will present a demonstration of our system at the conference. We have already successfully demonstrated it to the Japanese press.

QoS harmonization for home networks

A modern home could contain a large variety of devices and all of them should be able to work together so as to bring a rich experience to the users. Quality of service (QoS) is a critical factor for measuring user satisfaction. It represents the ability to provide different priorities based on the type of the data flows or to guarantee a certain quality of performance to a particular service. Different devices may follow different protocols and each protocol has its own QoS management scheme. These QoS schemes are not necessarily compatible with one another and the inconsistency will significantly impair their efficacy. In this paper, we propose a harmonized protocol for home network, which unifies all other protocols and solves the inconsistency problem effectively.

MPEG-7 meta-data enhanced encoder system for embedded systems

We describe a MPEG-7 Meta-Data enhanced Audio-Visual Encoder system that targets DVD recorders. We extract features in the compressed domain with both video and audio, which allows us to add the meta-data extraction without altering the hardware architecture of the encoder core. Our feature extraction algorithms are simple, and thus implementable through a simple combination of software and hardware on the integrated DVD chip. The primary application of the meta-data is video summarization, which enables rapid browsing of stored video by the end user. The simplicity of our summarization and feature extraction algorithms enables incorporation of the powerful functionality of smart content navigation through content summarization, into the DVD recorder at a low cost.

Video browsing system for personal video recorders

We present a novel low-complexity content-based browsing system for personal video recorders. It provides convenient access to any part of the content with an integrated browser-player that uses unique rapid summarization and indexing with compressed domain color and motion features, as well as audio features. Our summarization is similar in accuracy to other competing techniques and is computationally much simpler.

A low-cost video frame-rate up conversion using compressed-domain information

A new low-cost video frame-rate up conversion (FRC) technique that exploits compressed-domain information is proposed in this paper. Recent worldwide growth of digital video applications such as home AV network or mobile multimedia have been demanding higher video compression ratio in order to meet system requirements related to limited bandwidth or storage capacity. Enhancement of temporal resolution using FRC at decoder side is attractive in a sense that the R-D performance can be maintained even at low bitrate condition by dropping frames during encoding and recovering them at decoder side by FRC. The proposed FRC method aims to provide accurate estimates of block-based motion vectors for recovered frames based on compressed-domain information. The goal of our study is to realize a decoder design with robust FRC over a variety of implementation platforms from mobile to consumer set-top.

MPEG-7 applications for video browsing and analysis

The soon to be released MPEG-7 standard provides a Multimedia Content Description Interface. In other words, it provides a rich set of tools to describe the content with a view to facilitating applications such as content based querying, browsing and searching of multimedia content. In this paper, we describe practical applications of MPEG-7 tools. We use descriptors of features such as color, shape and motion to both index and analyze the content. The aforementioned descriptors stem from our previous work and are currently in the draft international MPEG-7 standard. In our previous work, we have shown the efficacy of each of the descriptors individually. In this paper, we show how we combine color and motion to effectively browse video in our first application. In our second application, we show how we can combine shape and color to recognize objects in real time. We will present a demonstration of our system at the conference. We have already successfully demonstrated it to the Japanese press.

The development of super high definition image storage system

A super-high-definition (SHD) image storage system was developed for next-generation visual communication. This system with a high-speed signal processing function is designed to display a 2048 by 2048 pixel (non-interlaced 60 frames per second) real-time motion color picture of maximum 16-s interval. The requirements for this system and the specification are discussed, and the hardware architecture of the high-resolution memory unit, D/A converter unit, DMA controller, address generator, and high-speed data buses are introduced in detail. This system can be utilized for the coding quality evaluation for SHD images which provide resolution equivalent to 35-mm film.<<ETX>>