Mauritz Panggabean

Toward futuristic near-natural collaborations on Distributed Multimedia Plays architecture

This paper presents a vision of how people can collaborate in real-time in the future from different places on the continents with near-natural quality of experience. To achieve that very high quality, the requirements are also very high and challenging. The ultimate challenge for its implementation is to guarantee end-to-end delay less than 10–20ms with graceful quality variability to enable live musical collaborations. The Distributed Multimedia Plays architecture with the AppTraNet protocol and the design of the collaboration spaces is our proposal for the realization of the vision, since existing Internet standards are unable to provide such guarantee. The relation of this novel proposal to the existing and future standards is also discussed. It is expected that significant milestones on this research avenue will be attainable in the next 5–10 years.

Parallel image transmission and compression Using windowed kriging interpolation

We propose the use of windowed kriging to enable ordinary kriging to interpolate sampled natural images of much higher resolution. Due to its high computational cost, applying ordinary kriging on a whole image can interpolate samples from only 5% of a 64×64 image, while windowed kriging can process images with resolutions higher than 512×512 pixels. Our proposal is motivated by our vision of real-time near-natural collaboration from distributed places based on Distributed Multimedia Plays (DMP) architecture that is realizable in another decade. Windowed kriging allows parallel transmission and compression of sampled natural images to facilitate controlled packets dropping by network nodes for graceful video quality degradation with guaranteed maximum end-to-end delay. Our simple window scheme makes parallel interpolation at the receiver side possible, for which a design of parallel hardware implementation is presented. Typical artifacts due to applying the technique can easily be eliminated completely to produce images of decent quality.

FPGA Architecture for Kriging Image Interpolation

This paper proposes an ultrafast scalable embedded image compression scheme based on discrete cosine transform. It is designed for general network architecture that guarantees maximum end-to-end delay (EED), in particular the Distributed Multimedia Plays (DMP) architecture. DMP is designed to enable people to perform delay-sensitive real-time collaboration from remote places via their own collaboration space (CS). It requires much lower EED to achieve good synchronization than that in existing teleconference systems. A DMP node can drop packets from networked CSs intelligently to guarantee its local delay and degrade visual quality gracefully. The transmitter classifies visual information in an input image into priority ranks. Included in the bitstream as side information, the ranks enable intelligent packet dropping. The receiver reconstructs the image from the remaining packets. Four priority ranks for dropping are provided. Our promising results reveal that, with the proposed compression technique, maximum EED can be guaranteed with graceful degradation of image quality. The given parallel designs for its hardware implementation in FPGA shows its technical feasibility as a module in the DMP architecture.

Chroma interpolation using windowed kriging for color-image compression-by-network with guaranteed delay

Artistic elements in immersive collaborations, like collaborative percussions and dancing, depend on visual cues and thus require a same constant delay for both audio and video data to ensure harmonious synchronization. We envision the compression-by-network approach where network nodes can reduce video data intelligently due to immediate traffic conditions to guarantee maximal constant delay for video data with graceful quality degradation. To process color information with that approach, in this paper we propose using windowed kriging for chroma interpolation and investigate the effects. We define color compressibility as the maximal compression ratio of color information without noticeable artifact. Our results show that, based on compressibility, network nodes can discard 99% of chroma pixels and the receiver interpolates the chroma images using only the received 1% to yield the output color image without salient artifact. We discover that red and similar colors have lower compressibility than blue or green.

AN FPGA-BASED PLATFORM FOR A NETWORK ARCHITECTURE WITH DELAY GUARANTEE

The background that underlies this work is the envisioned real-time tele-immersive collaboration system for the future that supports delay-sensitive applications involving participants from remote places via their collaboration spaces (CSs). The end-to-end delay as high as 20 ms is required for good synchronization of such applications, for example collaborative dancing and remote conducting of choir. It is much lower than that facilitated by existing teleconference systems. A novel network architecture with delay guarantee, namely Distributed Multimedia Plays (DMP), has been proposed and designed to realize the vision. The maximum low latency is guaranteed because DMP network nodes can drop DMP packets of multimedia data from the CSs due to instantaneous traffic condition. Besides ultrafast processing time, modularity, and scalability must be taken into account in hardware design and implementation of the nodes for seamless incorporation of the modules. These lead us to employing field-programmable gate array (FPGA) due to its substantial computational power and flexibility. This paper presents an FPGA-based platform for the design and implementation of DMP network nodes. It provides a detailed introduction to the platform architecture and the simulation-implementation environment for the design. The modularity of the implemented node is shown by addressing three important modules for packet dropping, 3D warping, and image transform. Our compact implementation of the network node on Xilinx Virtex-6 ML605 mostly consumes very small amount of available resources. Moreover the elementary operations on our implementation takes (much) less than 5 μs as desired to meet the low-latency requirement.

FPGA-Based Platform for Real-Time Internet

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are widely used in telecommunication due their substantial computational power and flexibly designed architecture. These features become especially important for applications of low transmission latency such as those supported by Distributed Multimedia Plays (DMP) architecture. Thus FPGAs are chosen in this work as the core building block of the system. Complex multi-node telecommunication systems require special design methodology contrary to small ICT applications usually implemented in HDL. The methodology should be based on the appropriate tools from FPGA vendors for support and maintenance. This paper presents an architecture of a module to be embedded in all the FPGA-based nodes constituting a platform for the Real Time Internet based on DMP. It is designed using an embedded development kit natively supported by Xilinx and flexible in available cores. We present the implementation results of the network-node module and the description of PCIe-based protocol for inter-FPGA communication.

Character recognition of the Batak Toba alphabet using signatures and simplified chain code

This paper presents the simplified chain code (SCC) from our concept of basic shape to recognize the characters of Batak Toba alphabet. The proposed chain code is based on the eight-direction Freeman chain code from which the horizontal and vertical directions are omitted. Hence we focus on shapes with dominant diagonal contours which characterize the recognized alphabet. Our implementation shows that recognizing the alphabet using the scale-invariant SCC can achieve more than 90% accuracy and is more than 10 times faster than that using signatures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported attempt of recognizing the Batak Toba alphabet.

Modeling and simulating motions of human bodies in a futuristic distributed tele-immersive collaboration system for synthesizing transient input traffic

Abstract In this paper we model human body as a discrete-event system that enables applying discrete-event simulation (DES) to forward kinematics of stochastic and deterministic motions of a human body. Human gait cycles for walking and running are examples of the latter. Fast and flexible DES is made possible by linear interpolation for both motion types. It gives close approximation to finite Fourier series that model natural gait cycles. We use the simulator as the building block in simulating a futuristic tele-immersive collaboration system with arbitrary multi-actor collaboration scenario from remote locations. The silhouette area from the visualization of simulated moving human bodies is the main feature in synthesizing transient traffic that would result from such collaboration system. It will be useful as the input traffic for DES of arbitrary networks in future work. We demonstrate how to apply the simulation framework to simulate a scenario of collaborative dancing and singing that involves four performers with both motion types from two different places. Through the scenario we also show how the simulator works as a novel transient-traffic generator.

Ultrafast Scalable Embedded DCT Image Coding for Tele-immersive Delay-Sensitive Collaboration

A delay-sensitive, real-time, tele-immersive collaboration for the future requires much lower end-to-end delay (EED) for good synchronization than that for existing teleconference systems. Hence, the maximum EED must be guaranteed, and the visual-quality degradation must be graceful. Distributed Multimedia Plays (DMP) architecture addresses the envisioned collaboration and the challenges. We propose a DCT-based, embedded, ultrafast, quality scalable image-compression scheme for the collaboration on the DMP architecture. A parallel FPGA implementation is also designed to show the technical feasibility.