Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEx)

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What is QoMEx? I think it can be explained as a derivation of Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) whereby the latter is an extension of the former taking a user-centric approach, i.e., it is the user who is ultimately consuming a service and, therefore, shall be the focus of attention (see here or here for more details). An interview with Video Quality Experts can be found here.

Quality of Multimedia Experience is basically an application of QoE in the field of multimedia (communication), e.g., Video on Demand, streaming, audio/video conferencing, voice applications, etc. etc.

Recently, quite a few multimedia events (conferences, workshops, symposia) appeared on the horizon and I'd like to name just a few:

• Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEx)
• Workshop on Quality of Experience for Multimedia Content Sharing (QoEMCS)
• Workshop on Image Media Quality and its Applications (IMQA 2010) 
• Workshop on Video Processing and Quality Metrics for Consumer Electronics (VPQM 2010)
• Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS)
• ITU-T Workshop on End-to-End QoE/QoS
• Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness (QShine2009) 
• Conference on Communication Theory, Reliability, and Quality of Service (CTRQ 2010) 
• Workshop on the Evaluation of Quality of Service through Simulation in the Future Internet(QoSim 2009)

"My own" two workshops related to QoS ;-)

• ENTHRONE Workshop on End-to-End QoS through Integrated Management of Content, Networks, and Terminal 2008 
• Workshop on End-to-End Quality of Service for Universal Multimedia Access (E2E-QoS4UMA 2006)

If you think something is missing here, please drop me a note...

Call for Technical Demonstration Submissions – VCIP2010

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The 2010 Visual Communications and Image Processing conference (VCIP2010) will be held in Huang Shan, An Hui, China, 11-14 July 2010. Visual communication has become an important engineering area that attracts interdisciplinary research interest and has lead to significant developments in technology and science. This conference is designed as a forum for presenting important research results. We are currently seeking outstanding technical demo submissions.
Demonstrations will include leading edge work and work in progress in every area of visual communication or image processing technology and its implementation and applications. Submissions are encouraged in areas including image and video coding, visual communication techniques, image and video analysis, image and video synthesis and rendering. In particular, it is encouraged to submit demonstrations on practical systems and research prototypes in these areas.
Submissions will be peer-reviewed to ensure quality. Submitters are encouraged to provide videos where applicable to show the proposed demonstrations. Demonstrators will be provided with space, poser and networking (with special request). Participants will be required to provide their own computing equipment and any additional network, display, sensor, etc., hardware needed for the demonstration.
For more information about VCIP2010, please see http://vcip2010.ustc.edu.cn/, or contact: vcip2010@ustc.edu.cn.
Submission Instructions:
Those who are interested in submitting technical demos should submit a description of the demo in one page, using the template of VCIP2010 Demo, via the online submission system (https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/VCIP2010/). Descriptions of selected demos will be included in VCIP 2010 webpage and brochure. If you also submit video, please do not send the video file itself but send a link to the video (e.g., a URL to download it).
Submission Deadline: 10 March 2010
Authors will be notified of acceptance by 31 March 2010.
Demo Chairs:
Shao-Yi Chien (sychien@cc.ee.ntu.edu.tw), National Taiwan University (Taiwan)
Ye-Kui Wang (yekuiwang@huawei.com), Huawei Technologies, USA

References about the Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) standard and related technology principles

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G. J. Sullivan, "Standards-based approaches to 3D and multiview video coding", SPIE Applications of Digital Image Processing XXXII, Aug. 2009.

A. Vetro, S. Yea, M. Zwicker, W. Matusik, H. Pfister, "Overview of multiview video coding and anti-aliasing for 3D displays", IEEE Int'l Conf on Image Proc., Sept. 2007.
(esp. section 2 - http://www.merl.com/reports/docs/TR2007-027.pdf)

A. Vetro, S. Yea, and A. Smolic, "Towards a 3D video format for auto-stereoscopic displays", SPIE Conference on Applications of Digital Image Processing XXXI, Aug. 2008.
(esp. section 2.4 - http://www.merl.com/papers/docs/TR2008-057.pdf)

Philipp Merkle, Aljoscha Smolic, Karsten Müller, and Thomas Wiegand: Efficient Prediction Structures for Multiview Video Coding, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Special Issue on Multi-view Video Coding and 3DTV, vol. 17, no. 11, pp. 1461-1473, November 2007
(http://ip.hhi.de/imagecom_G1/assets/pdfs/ieee07_Prediction_MVC.pdf)

Philipp Merkle, Karsten Müller, Aljoscha Smolic, and Thomas Wiegand: Efficient Compression of Multi-View Video Exploiting Inter-View Dependencies Based on H.264/MPEG4-AVC,
IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME'06), Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 2006.
(http://ip.hhi.de/imagecom_G1/assets/pdfs/h264_multi_view.pdf)

Aljoscha Smolic, Karsten Müller, Philipp Merkle, Christoph Fehn, Peter Kauff, Peter Eisert, and Thomas Wiegand: 3D Video and Free Viewpoint Video - Technologies, Applications and MPEG Standards, Proceedings of International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME 2006), Toronto, Canada, pp. 2161-2164, July 2006.

Karsten Müller, Philipp Merkle, Heiko Schwarz, Tobias Hinz, Aljoscha Smolic, and Thomas Wiegand:
Multi-view Video Coding Based on H.264/AVC Using Hierarchical B-Frames, Picture Coding Symposium (PCS'06), Beijing, China, April 2006.

Ying Chen, Ye-Kui Wang, Kemal Ugur, Miska M. Hannuksela, Jani Lainema, and Moncef Gabbouj, “3D video services with the emerging MVC standard”, EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, Volume 2009 (2009), Article ID 786015, 13 pages, doi:10.1155/2009/786015.

MPEG targets next generation teleconferencing and personalized audio in its newest technology

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Kyoto, Japan – The 91st MPEG meeting was held in Kyoto, Japan from the 18th to the 22nd of January 2010.

Highlights of the 91st Meeting

• Advanced technology enables bitrate-efficient teleconferencing and personalized audio
• MPEG and ITU-T SG16 form Joint Collaborative Team (JCT) for High Performance Video Coding
• Creating solutions for Advanced IPTV Terminals
• MPEG Extensible Middleware (MXM) standard debuts to facilitate easy access to MPEG tools across a global market
• MPEG creates efficient and flexible standard for 3D graphics compression
• MPEG Media Transport (MMT) workshop targets requirements and technologies for streaming of MPEG content

Wanna know more/details? Please check out the official press release!

W3C's "The System Information API"

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W3C has published a first working draft out of their Device APIs and Policy Working Group and it is for sure worth to look into. Let's have a look at the abstract:

This specification defines an API to provide Web applications with access to various properties of the system which they are running on. Specifically, properties pertaining to the device hardware are addressed. Examples include battery status, current network bandwidth. Additionally, some of those properties offer access to the environment around the device, such as ambient brightness or atmospheric pressure.

Remember that's a first working draft which means it's still subject to changes. There's also a nice figure that gives a good overview which APIs one can anticipate in this standard.

In any case, I would appreciate if W3C could define the scope of this specification and what they actually mean by a "system". A proper definition thereof is somewhat missing at the moment but remember, it's a first working draft only...

Finally, defining APIs are now in vogue within SDOs as W3C is doing it for a while, MPEG has some APIs defined and will continue this path, and I wonder whether IETF is also about to join the API club.

Science 2.0

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First of all, I'm not doing research in this area but I'm a user of Web 2.0 services and would like to use it for disseminating my research results, e.g., see one of my previous posts. Furthermore, I'm an associate editor for Computing Now and would like to share some findings I've gathered together with respect to Scientific Publishing + Web 2.0 = Science 2.0. If one does a Google search on this, one might get back quite a few results. However, here's my view on that and maybe you like it - or not - but in any case, your feedback is very much appreciated! First of all, Computing Now is already some kind of Science 2.0 service as it provides a mash-up of articles across all IEEE Computer Society magazines that are related to a certain topic identified by the editorial board. Check out our editorial calender for details and upcoming issues.


However, traditional scientific publishers like IEEE and ACM/Springer still follow they "good old procedure": (1) Submit a paper, (2) peer review, (3) revision if necessary, (4) submit camera-ready paper, and (5) publishing in a journal which appear on a regular basis, even still in print format, but in any case PDF only! I also have still some subscriptions running but I must admit that I rarely look into it, i.e., the print versions.

Recently, they've started to provide RSS feeds (e.g., Computing Now Feeds) but still they are updated once a month or so and with each update one receives a punch of new online papers for which its difficult to overview them. Furthermore, there's almost no possibility to share your feedback to a certain article other than posting it on your own blog or get directly in touch with the authors by email. However, if one visits Computing Now Web site right at the moment, one is able to share articles from the "current theme" and "new articles" sections using an AddThis button and there is also a commenting feature BUT one has to login with her/his IEEE account! Anyway, I know that people are working hard in order to improve the current situation ... stay tuned.

Nevertheless, I'd like to come back to my understanding of Science 2.0 and here's a brief high-level workflow how it should look like. For quality assurance one needs a review process which is okay for me but once it comes to the publishing, people should start thinking about alternatives (see also figure above):

1. Make the paper available as HTML/XML (e.g., like a blog post) so that people can comment on it and enable efficient sharing possibilities. Once the content (i.e., the paper) is available in a structured format, one can easily repurpose it for whatever other needs (e.g., platforms, devices, etc.). That is, everything needs to be repurposeable!
2. Ask authors to provide alternative presentation forms like slides (e.g., for Slideshare) or even a video (e.g., for YouTube).
3. Most authors are asked to provide an abstract so why not asking them to provide a 100 character summary for Twitter or identi.ca. The abstract could be still used for Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, etc. which allow for more characters/words.
4. Finally and most importantly, utilize the feedback (see also figure above) from the readers coming through the various social network channels and bring it back to the authors, i.e., by email or any other communication media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS, etc.) the authors have provided during the submission of the camera-ready paper. In this way we would create a new Web 2.0-enabled scientific discourse ultimately leading to real Science 2.0.

For sure the last bullet is the most difficult/complex one but no worries there are already tools out there which at least partially support this kind of functionality and they are generally referred to as commenting systems (e.g., DISQUS, JS-KIT ECHO, IntenseDebate, etc.). Okay, that's it from my side and I hope to receive a lot of comments and feedback ...

The Fourth International Workshop on Image Media Quality and its Applications (IMQA 2010)

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Fourth International Workshop on Image Media Quality and its Applications (IMQA 2010)

http://www.imqa.jp/IMQA2010/

Important dates:

Submission deadline:          February 19, 2010 (Extended !!)

Notification of acceptance:   March 20, 2010

Camera ready submission:      April 10, 2010

Workshop:                     May 13-14, 2010

The Fourth International Workshop on Image Media Quality and its Applications (IMQA 2010) is a forum for leading researchers and developers from industry and academia to discuss state-of-the-art and novel image media quality technologies, theories, methods, and applications of quality metrics in industry.

Scope

Topics of interest for submissions should include Image Media Quality, but are not limited to:

* Image Capture Devices (CCD, CMOS, etc.)

* Image Capture System (TV Camera, Digital Still Camera, Facsimile, Scanner, 3Dimage Input, etc.)

* Display (CRT, LCD, PDP, EL, etc.), Display System, 3D-Display, Holograph

* Hard Copy (Ink Jet Printer, Laser Printer, etc.), Graphic Arts (Halftone Screen, Error Diffusion, etc.)

* QoS Control and Scheduling, IP Video Conferencing, Video phone, Scalable Coding,

* Digital Broadcasting System, 3DTV, Super-High-Definition TV

* Multimedia Database (Content Recognition, Analysis, Representation, Indexing, and Retrieval)

* Coding (JPEG, JPEG2000, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, etc)

* Assessment Test Methodology (DSIS, DSCQS, SSCQE, etc.)

* Objective Picture Quality Metric (VQEG, etc.)

* Image Reproduction, Image Restoration, Computer Graphics, Computer Vision、Animation, Virtual Reality

* Human Perception, Psychophysics, Color Reproduction, Hi-fidelity , Sensibility Information

* Security (Data hiding, Watermarking, Individual Identification, etc.)

* Human-Machine Interface, Welfare

Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit an electronic version (using PDF) of a 2-4 page abstract of their paper for review. The authors of accepted papers are requested to submit the final camera-ready manuscript of 4-10 pages that will appear in the workshop proceedings.

Extended versions of selected contributions will be published in forth coming special issue of Trans. IEICE-EA.