Media Systems Group
Group leader: Professor Irek Defée
Media systems group focuses on all aspects of architecture and applications of systems for handling of digital media content. Media systems constitute a backbone of modern information society and their role is ever increasing. Media systems integrate networks, servers, clients, compression, streaming and interactive applications to provide seamless user experience. Example of media systems are digital television, internet television, video on demand like YouTube, mobile television, networked games.
Research of the group can be divided in the following topics:
- Broadband Multimedia Systems
- Multimedia in Heterogeneous Networks
- New Forms of Interactivity
- New Signal and Information Processing Principles and Problems
Broadband Multimedia Systems
The precursor of broadband multimedia systems is television. When television was digitized it became digital media and its data stream could be sent over the Internet provided that the network bandwidth was sufficient. We have been investigating how to build IPTV systems that is television transmitted over the Internet. This requires development of protocols, streaming systems, gateways between the traditional broadcast systems and IP networks, and information management. Some aspects of these technologies were commercialized by spin-off company. We have also investigated mobile television system builiding a full test bed for trials and developing concepts for mobile broadcast services.
Multimedia in Heterogeneous Networks
Although all networks use IP protocols, there are many different physical networks for example WLAN, 4G, DVB. All these networks can be used for delivery of multimedia content, the problem is how to integrate them so user can receive data in optimal way without a need for manipulation with network access. We have been investigating networked multimedia and broadcast systems which are in wide use at present. Delivery of multimedia content to home, and mobile devices were of particular interest.
New Forms of Interaction
Interaction with media is of critical importance for users. Traditional forms of interaction using remote controller, mouse, keyboard and joysticks has been in use for a very long time due to their simplicity and difficulty with replacing by more sophisticated devices. Big change in this area was introduction of touch displays reacting to gestures which changed the way users interact with mobile devices. We are currently investigating natural interfaces based on the example of Kinect which is the first device reacting to human body gestures, speech and video. This device can have many potential applications which are also the topic of investigations.
New Signal and Information Processing Principles and Methods
Despite long research basic issues related to understanding signal content are still not solved. This makes difficult to build systems which are able to process signals and extract information on the level comparable to animals and humans which would allow natural interaction with people. We are looking into algorithms for representing and processing visual information aiming for the development of efficient methods.