Key Note: State of The MPEG-4 Art - Where Are We Today?

Rob Koenen (President, M4IF; InterTrust Technologies)
Rob Koenen works for InterTrust Technologies Corporation as a Vice President . He is responsible for for strategic technological partnerships and standards.

Before joining InterTrust, Mr. Koenen was a research director at KPN Research in The Netherlands for 10 years. There he researched various aspects of audio/visual communications, working as project manager and later as the coordinator of the video group within KPN Research. His numerous projects with KPN included: image coding research, audio/visual communication for people with special needs, interactive broadband multimedia for residential users, mobile multimedia, the strategic development of new multimedia services, audio/visual quality assessment and multimedia standardization.

Mr. Koenen was chairman of the MPEG Requirements Group from 1996 to 2002, and has played a key role in the development of the MPEG-4 standard since its inception in 1993, in defining the upcoming MPEG-7 standard since the start in 1995, and in defining the requirements for MPEG-21. he is the initiator of the MPEG-4 Industry Forum (www.m4if.org) and has been its president since June 2000, when M4IF was invcorporated in Switzerland. Mr. Koenen received his MSEE degree in 1989 from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands where he studied electrical engineering, specializing in information theory.

MPEG-4 101: An introduction to the MPEG-4 Industry Forum

Tim Schaaff (Board Member, M4IF; Vice President, Apple Computer)
Mr. Schaaff is the Vice-President of Engineering for Apple's Interactive Media Group and is responsible for Apple's graphics, video, audio, and imaging software technologies. His team is also responsible for QuickTime, Apple's popular multimedia creation and publishing software. With it's industry-leading support for open media standards such as DVD, MPEG-2, MP3, and Firewire, Apple has made a strong commitment to supporting a standards-based technical strategy. As a founder of the ISMA and contributor of the file format for MPEG-4, Apple has made a strong commitment to MPEG-4. Apple is currently developing an MPEG-4 QuickTime media player and will work with the community to catalyze the adoption of MPEG technology throughout the industry.

Tim Schaaff joined Apple in 1991 and has held numerous engineering and engineering management positions within the company. Mr. Schaaff received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH) in 1982.

Tutorial Sessions

Tutorial 1: MPEG-4 Architecture & Systems Basics

Summary:

This tutorial starts from the basic design assumptions of the MPEG-4 Systems specification. The dual concepts of 'scene description' and 'stream description' are introduced and the details of the scene description language BIFS (BInary Format for Scene description) and the elementary stream management are explored. Further topics include programmability through MPEG-J and the more recent additions to the specification to control the presentation of streaming media. The tutorial concludes with an overview of the delivery of MPEG-4 content on the most popular infrastructures, namely IP and MPEG-2 streams.

Speakers:

Carsten Herpel is a senior development engineer at Thomson Multimedia's research facility in Hannover, Germany. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. degree in communications engineering from RWTH Aachen, Germany (1988). His research interests have covered video compression where he was working on scalable coding for MPEG-2 and then moved on to rich media compression formats as well as multimedia system architecture with a focus on MPEG-4. He is a co-editor of the MPEG-4 Systems and the MPEG-7 Systems specification.

Tutorial 2 : MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding

Summary:

An overview of the latest video coding standard being jointly developed by the Joint Video Team (JVT) of MPEG and ITU-T experts will be given. This standard is called AVC (Advanced Video Coding) within MPEG-4 (where it is Part 10) and H.264 within ITU-T. A high level understanding of the coding algorithm will be provided. Video coding efficiency of this standard will also be compared with that of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ASP (Advanced Simple Profile). Several demonstrations showing the video quality at different bit rates, and how it compares to MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ASP on side-by-side viewing, will also be given.

Speakers:

Ajay Luthra received his B.E. (Hons) from BITS, Pilani, India in 1975, M.Tech. in Communications Engineering from IIT Delhi in 1977 and Ph.D. from Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania in 1981. From 1981 to 1984 he was a Senior Engineer at Interspec Inc., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he was involved in applications of Digital Signal and Image Processing for Bio-medical applications. From 1984 to 1995 he was at Tektronix, Beaverton, Oregon, where from 1985 - 1990 he was manager of Digital Signal and Picture Processing Group and from 1990 - 1995 he was Director of Communications / Video Systems Research Lab. He is currently a Senior Director in Advanced Technology Group at Motorola, Broadband Communications Sector (formerly General Instrument) in San Diego, California, where he is involved in advanced development work in the areas of Digital Video Compression & Processing, Streaming Video, Interactive TV, Cable Head-End system design and Advanced Set Top Box architectures. He has been an active member of MPEG committee for the last ten years where he has chaired several technical sub-groups. He is an associate rapporteur/co-chair of Joint Video Team consisting of ISO/MPEG and ITU-T/H.26L experts working on developing next generation of video coding standards. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (2000-2002) and also a Guest Editor for its Special Issue on Streaming Video, March 2001.

Tutorial 3 : MPEG-4 Audio Basics and Extensions

Summary:

The tutorial describes the comprehensive toolbox of MPEG-4 Audio coding, covering the full range of techniques from low bitrate speech coding to high quality audio coding and music synthesis. The natural coding part within MPEG-4 Audio describes speech and high quality audio coding algorithms and their combination enabling new functionalities, including scalability (hierarchical coding). The tutorial gives a general overview of the basic algorithms and their applications and is illustrated by demonstrations of recent MPEG-4 coding technology. Furthermore, ongoing and new work items within MPEG-4 Audio ("extensions") are discussed.

Speakers:

Jürgen Herre: After receiving his MS degree from Erlangen university, Jürgen Herre joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) in Erlangen, Germany, in 1989. Since then he has been involved into the development of perceptual coding algorithms for high quality audio, such as the well-known coding algorithms ASPEC and ISO/MPEG-Audio Layer III (aka "MP3"). In 1995, Dr. Herre joined Bell Laboratories for a PostDoc term working on the development of the MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) scheme. Since the end of '96 he is back at Fraunhofer working on the development of advanced multimedia technology including MPEG-4, MPEG-7 and secure delivery of audiovisual content. Currently, Dr. Herre is the chief scientist for the Audio & Multimedia activities at Fraunhofer IIS Erlangen, coordinating research activities on watermarking of audio signals, analysis/feature extraction/recognition of audio signals and advanced audio compression schemes. He has published numerous papers on these and other topics and was awarded 15 patents, several more are pending. Dr. Herre is a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society, co-chair of the AES Technical Committee on Coding of Audio Signals and vice chair of the AES Technical Council. He served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing and is an active member of the MPEG audio subgroup.

Bernhard Grill was born in Schwabach, Germany, in 1961. He received a M.S. (Diplom) degree in electrical engineering from Erlangen University. A member of the AES, Mr. Gill's interests center on music. At the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (FhG-IIS) and the University of Erlangen he has contributed to the development of several perceptual audio coder systems. These include ASPEC, ISO/IEC MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer-3 (mp3), and MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). Recent work concentrated on scalable audio coding, now part of MPEG-4 Audio. He was the coordinating editor of the MPEG-4 Audio standard. Bernhard Grill has been granted appr. fifteen audio coding patents and has several more pending. Currently he is the head of the audio department at the IIS. He has presented numerous papers at AES conventions and other international conferences. In September 2000 he received the AES Fellowship Award for his work on MPEG-4 Audio and scalable audio coding. In October 2000, he and two colleagues received the "German Future Award" for their work on MP3. He has been granted 15 patents and has several more pending.

Giorgio Zoia received the Diploma in Electronic Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 1996, and the PhD ès Sciences Techniques from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in 2001, with a thesis on fast prototyping of multimedia architectures. After some important experiences in video encoding (MPEG-2) and design of digital circuits, in 1997 he started his research at the EPFL on multimedia systems design, with a particular interest for Audio. At the end of 1997 he joined the MPEG-4 committee, where he is still active with contributions concerning Structured Audio, Audio Composition, scene descriptions (Systems) and related analysis of computational complexity. Starting in 1999 he developed one of the first efficient MPEG-4 SA decoders, based on a virtual DSP architecture with vectorial instruction set. He is currently collaborating to a project aiming at developing a complete MPEG-4 encoding, transmission, decoding and rendering chain for interactive 3D acoustical environments. Among the research interests there are also the techniques and languages for content representation, and the development of multimodal interactive systems.

Tutorial 4 : MPEG-4 Visual Basics

Summary:

This tutorial addresses the MPEG-4 standard as defined in ISO/IEC 14496-2: Visual, its amendments as well as some of the planned work items. The MPEG-4 Visual standard has developed to provide users a new level of interaction with visual contents. It provides technologies to view, access and manipulate objects of any origin (synthetic or natural), with useful features such as compression efficiency at a large range of bit rates, error robustness, various scalabilities, etc. Application areas range from digital television, and Internet video streaming, to mobile multimedia and games. The MPEG-4 Visual standard can be divided into a collection of natural and synthetic video tools supporting these application areas. The standard provides tools for shape coding, motion estimation and compensation, texture coding, error resilience, sprite coding and various scalability features, face animation, body animation, dynamic mesh coding as well as three dimensional photo-realistic coding. This tutorial will provide an overview of these tools with examples of possible applications where they can be used for, as well as issues to be taken into account when designing systems based in MPEG-4 visual standard.

Speakers:

Touradj Ebrahimi was born on July 30, 1965. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both in Electrical Engineering, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. From 1989 to 1992, he was a research assistant at the Signal Processing Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). During the summer 1990, he was a visiting researcher at the Signal and Image Processing Institute of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. In 1993, he was a research engineer at the Corporate Research Laboratories of Sony Corporation in Tokyo, where he conducted research on advanced video compression techniques for storage applications. In 1994, he served as a research consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories working on very low bitrate video coding. He is currently a Professor at the Signal Processing Laboratory of EPFL, where he is involved with various aspects of Digital Video and Multimedia applications and in charge of the Digital TV group. In 1989, he was the recipient of the IEEE and Swiss national ASE award. His research interests are multidimensional signal processing, image processing, information theory, and coding. He is the author or the co-author of more than 100 research publications, and 12 patents. He is a member of the IEEE, SPIE and EURASIP.

Tutorial 5 : IPMP

Summary:

The IPMP tutorial will contain a top to bottom discussion of all aspects of the current MPEG IPMP extensions work. It will begin with a general description of the design goals used during the creation of the specifications as well as explaining factors leading up to each specific goal's inclusion. Following that, the discussion will move to covering the overlying architecture with points tied back to the original design goals. Finally the discussion will cover the exact parts of the specifications that provide the functionality of the architecture and how each of the parts not only work together but how each can be used both normatively and in interesting ways to provide applications that will be able to go beyond what is possible by only directly applying the specifications to a given application.

Speakers:

Craig A. Schultz has been a leading member of the MPEG group defining the IPMP specifications. He has not only been a major contributor in the area of architecture but has also been the prime contributor in areas of security. Craig also has recently help start a project in MPEG-21 to define requirements for a multi-media architecture and if requirements call for specifications to be created, will then contribute in that area as well. Craig currently works for AccessTicket Systems Inc., a Japanese company partially owned by Fuji Xerox, whose core technology is in the new and exciting area of Digital Qualification. With a job title of "Samurai Coder" in the Emerging Technologies department, Craig has the great fortune to have some of the more interesting jobs and projects available in his company.

Tutorial 6 : FGS and Advanced Simple Profile

Summary:

This tutorial session presents a detailed description of the Fine Granularity Scalability (FGS) tools in MPEG-4. It also covers the definition of the Advanced Simple Profile. The objective of video coding has traditionally been to optimize video quality at a given bitrate. Due to the network video applications, such as Internet streaming video, the objective is somewhat changed. This change is necessary because network video has introduced a new system configuration and the network channel capacity varies in a wide range depending on the type of connections and the network traffic at any given time. Therefore, the objective of video coding for Internet streaming video is changed to optimizing the video quality over a given bitrate range instead of at a given bitrate. The FGS tools in MPEG-4 provide a practical way to code video contents into a bitrate range and, within the bitrate range, the bitstreams can be truncated at any bitrate for delivery. In this session, the experts on FGS techniques will start with the basic coding techniques for FGS, present some advanced features of the FGS technology in MPEG-4, and discuss some new improvements in FGS video coding.

Speakers:

Weiping Li received his B.S. degree from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1982, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1983 and 1988 respectively, all in electrical engineering. Since 1987, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Lehigh University. From 1998 to 1999, he worked with Optivision, Inc. in Palo Alto, California, as the Director of R&D. He has been working with WebCast Technologies, Inc., that he co-founded, since 2000.
Weiping Li has been elected to Fellow of IEEE for contributions to image and video coding algorithms, standards, and implementations. He is currently the Past Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the same journal from 1999 to 2001 and an Associate Editor from 1995 to 1999. He has served as an Editor for the Streaming Video Profile Amendment of MPEG-4 International Standard. He is a member of the Board of Directors for MPEG-4 Industry Forum. He served as one of the Guest Editors for a special issue of IEEE Proceedings on image and video compression (February 1995). He served as the Past-Chair (1998-1999) and Chair (1996-1998) of Technical Committee on Visual Signal Processing and Communications of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He has been the Program Chair of the MPEG-4 Workshop and Exhibition (2000, 2001, and 2002). He was a Co-Chair (1999) and Chair (1997) of Technical Track on Multimedia and Communications in IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. He served as the Chair of Best Student Paper Award Committee for 1999 SPIE Visual Communications and Image Processing Conference. From 1997 to 1998, he served as the Chair of Working Group on reaffirmation of IEEE Standard 1180 (Specifications for the Implementation of 8X8 Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform). Since 1995, he has been a member of Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) of International Standard Organization (ISO). Weiping Li was awarded Guest Professorships in University of Science and Technology of China and in Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2001. He received the Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1992 at Lehigh University and the Guo Mo-Ruo Prize for Outstanding Student in 1980 at University of Science and Technology of China.

Hong Jiang received the B. E. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China, in 1986; the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Academic Sinica, Beijing, China, in 1989; the M.S. degree in engineering science from Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, in 1992; and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, in 1999. From 1988 to 1990, he was a founding engineer and R&D manager at the Dayang Image Technology Corporation, Beijing, China. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he worked for two years as a software engineer at Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, PA. From 1994 to 1996, he was a research assistant at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Illinois. In 1996, he jointed Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, where he is now a senior staff architect responsible for developing and advancing graphics, video and communication subsystems for personal computer. His research interest includes media technology, computer platform architecture and computer interconnect technology. During 1999-2001, he has also actively participated in the MPEG-4 standardization process and served as a co-editor for the streaming video profile amendment of MPEG-4 international standard. He is now an active member of PCI-SIG, working on the next-generation high-speed interconnect standards. Dr. Jiang was the recipient of a Thayer School fellowship while at Dartmouth College and an ROT pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Cancer Institute while at University of Illinois. He is a member of IEEE. He is also a member of Phi Kappa Phi. He has been granted 3 patents and has 17 pending patents.

Mihaela van der Schaar received her MS and PhD in electrical engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 1996 and 2001, respectively. In 1996, she joined Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven as a Research Scientist in the TV Systems Department. From 1996 to 1998, she was involved in several projects, which investigated low-cost very high quality video compression techniques and their implementation for TV, computer and camera systems. Since November 1998, she is with Philips Research Briarcliff, USA, where she is currently a Senior Member of Research Staff in the Wireless Communications and Networking Department. She is currently involved in the research of video coding techniques for Internet and wireless video streaming and leads a team of researchers working on scalable video coding and streaming algorithms. Since 1999, she is an active participant to the MPEG-4 video standard, contributing to the "Fine Granularity Scalability" tool. Her research interests include image and video coding, multimedia communications and networking, and the transmission of multimedia data over wireless and packet networks. She has co-authored more than 40 conference and journal papers in this field and holds several patents.

Shipeng Li joined Microsoft Research Asia in May 1999. He is currently the research manager of Internet Media group. His research interests include scalable media coding and streaming, wireless video communication, application level networking, object-based image and video coding, video object tracking and extraction, digital right management, etc. From Oct. 1996 to May 1999, Dr. Li was with Multimedia Technology Laboratory at Sarnoff Corporation in Princeton, NJ (formerly David Sarnoff Research Center, and RCA Laboratories) as a member of technical staff. He has been actively involved in research and development of digital television, MPEG, JPEG, image/video compression, next generation multimedia standards and applications, consumer electronics. He made great contributions in shape-adaptive wavelet transforms, scalable shape coding and recently the error resilience tool in the FGS profile for the MPEG-4 standard. He has authored and co-authored over 70 technical publications and over 20 granted and pending US patents in image/video compression and communications, digital television, multimedia and wireless communication. He is the co-author of a book chapter in "Multimedia Systems and Standards" published by the Marcel Dekker, Inc. Dr. Li is a member of Visual Signal Processing and Communications committee of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.
Dr. Li received his B.S. and M.S. both in Electrical Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, in 1996. He was assistant professor in Electrical Engineering department at University of Science and Technology of China in 1991-1992.

Tutorial 7 : Streaming with MPEG-4

Summary:

This tutorial addresses all aspects of streaming of MPEG-4 content over IP networks. It introduces the streaming components, IETF protocols, Internet Streaming Media Alliance specification - ISMA 1.0, and the open source project: MPEG-4 IP. This tutorial would further go into details of using RTP, RTSP, and SDP with illustrative examples. The attendee would be walked through all the necessary details of these protocols for implementing streaming modules for a server or a client. The MPEG-4 payload formats, particularly the "Simple" RTP payload format which is a general and configurable payload structure to transport MPEG-4 elementary streams such as audio, speech, video and BIFS streams will be discussed in detail. This tutorial will also give an in depth look at the structural concepts that enable the versatility of the MP4 file format, with a particular look at the streaming support. MPEG4IP is an open source distribution that implements the ISMA 1.0 specification. It provides an end-to-end set of tools to encode, stream, and playback MPEG-4 audio and video over IP networks. The tutorial will also describe the MPEG4IP package in detail, and how it can be used in a variety of streaming scenarios including those with other ISMA components. Implementation experiences relating to the ISMA 1.0 technologies (MPEG-4, RTP/RTSP) will be shared.

Speakers:

Vishy Swaminathan: Introduction to Streaming Components, Protocols and ISMA 1.0 Viswanathan (Vishy) Swaminathan is a Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Dr. Swaminathan currently serves as the chair of the technical committee in the Internet Streaming Media Alliance. ISMA published the implementation specification ISMA 1.0 for streaming media over IP networks in August 2001 and is currently working on conformance to ISMA 1.0, DRM, and Advanced Content. He has been involved in the MPEG Standards body and particularly MPEG-4 Systems. He chaired the MPEG-J Standardization efforts in MPEG and was also the lead technical editor for Version 2 of the MPEG-4 Systems specification. His expertise and interest include video compression, IP media delivery, multimedia systems and standards. He got his MS and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering Department from Utah State University specializing in Image & Video compression. Before that he got his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication from College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, Chennai, India.

Bill May: Streaming Protocols Primer through examples (RTP, RTSP, SDP) Bill May is a technical leader with Cisco Systems, in the Cisco Technology Center. He has worked at Cisco since 1993, and has specialized in video for the past 3 years. He has been working on the Open Source player since October 2000, and has developed the general player architecture, as well as the RTSP client and SDP libraries.

Jan van der Meer: Transport of MPEG-4 Elementary Streams over RTP Jan van der Meer is with Philips Consumer Electronics, Eindhoven, The Netherlands and has been involved in the creation of a series of digital video standards and products. After involvement in the pre-development of the first digital video processing systems, he joined the MPEG standard committee almost from its very beginning and contributed since 1989 to the developments of the MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standards. In 1990 he was responsible for the extension of CD-I with Full Motion Video and with succeeding products based on MPEG-1, such as Video CD. He has also been responsible for Digital TV developments based on MPEG-2. He is worldwide acknowledged for his contributions to MPEG. Currently, he is with MP4Net, the Business Group within Philips that focuses on MPEG-4 based products, where he is involved in standard bodies for specific application areas where the use of MPEG-4 is discussed, such as 3GPP, ISMA and DVB.

Dave Singer: MPEG-4 File Format and Support for Streaming David Singer: As QuickTime EcoSystem Manager at Apple, Dr. David Singer is a member of the QuickTime engineering group, where he performs industry relations and standards work related to Apple's streaming technologies. Singer joined Apple in 1988 and has since held a number of positions in research and product development for the company. In addition to his work experience, Singer has been both editor and chair for the MPEG-4 file format ad-hoc group, and is currently editor for the Motion JPEG 2000 file format specification. He received his bachelors' degree and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, focusing on multimedia systems.

Dave Mackie: MPEG-4IP open source project David Mackie is a Technical Lead at the Cisco Technology Center. He has worked in the area of Internet streaming media for the past five years, and over the past two years has worked on the MPEG4IP package demonstrating the use of MPEG-4 over IP networks. He has worked in the computer industry for sixteen years, developing Internet technologies for both commercial and consumer products. Mr. Mackie holds a B.S.E. in Computer Science from Princeton University.

Tutorial 8 : AFX

Summary:

This tutorial first introduces general computer graphics concepts and reviews the particular Synthetic/Natural Hybrid Coding tools already present in MPEG-4 versions 1 and 2, such as Face and Body Animation, 3D Mesh Coding and Visual Texture Coding. It then explains how the AFX (Animation Framework eXtension) toolset to be included in MPEG-4 version 5 will bring more complete and general mechanisms for the efficient coding of both shapes and textures of static 3D models. Among these are higher order surface approximations (polynomial/rational patches, subdivision surfaces and MeshGrids); solid descriptions; image-based modeling/rendering techniques (Light Field Mapping and Depth Image Based Rendering); procedural and synthesized textures; etc. Many of such techniques consider the view-dependent transmission of hierarchical content, that bandwidth-limited or client-driven applications would benefit from. But, perhaps even more importantly, AFX will provide tools for the compact description of dynamic (i.e., animated) 3D objects, such as efficient interpolators and Bone-Based Animation.

Speakers:

Mikaël Bourges-Sévenier received an Engineer degree in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from the ECAM, Lyon, France. He also received an Engineer degree in Signal and Image Processing from the University of Rennes I, France. During this time, his research interests were on wavelets applied to numerical analysis, signal and image processing, and compression. In 1997, he joined the CNET (Telecommunication Studies National Centre, Rennes, France) and got involved in the development of MPEG-4 Systems, focusing on BIFS and its implementation in the MPEG-4 Reference Software and on advanced multimedia EU projects. Since 1999, he has been working as a senior software architect at different companies (iVAST, Nexternet, Mindego) located in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA. Mikaël is currently involved in the development of MPEG-4 version 5: he chairs the AFX group, co-chairs the SNHC group, and is the main editor of the MPEG-4 version 5 specification. He is also involved in the Browser Working Group of the Web3D Consortium and is in charge of X3D level 2.

Gauthier Lafruit was a research scientist with the Belgian National Foundation for Scientific Research from 1989 to 1994, being mainly active in the area of wavelet image compression. Subsequently, he was a research assistant at the VUB (Free University of Brussels, Belgium). In 1996, he joined IMEC (Interuniversity MicroElectronics Centre, Leuven, Belgium), where he was involved as Senior Scientist with the design of low-power VLSI for combined JPEG/wavelet compression engines. He is currently the Principal Scientist in the Multimedia Image Compression Systems Group at IMEC. His main interests include progressive transmission in still image, video and 3D object coding, as well as scalability and resource monitoring for advanced 3D applications. In this role, he has made decisive contributions to the standardisation of 3D-implementation complexity management in MPEG-4.

Francisco Morán Burgos obtained an Engineer degree from the ETSIT-UPM (Telecommunication Engineering School of the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain) in 1992, after finishing his Master Thesis at the Telecommunication Engineering School of Paris, France. After spending the 1996-97 academic year in the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, he received a Ph. D. degree from the ETSIT-UPM in 2001. Since 1992, he is a member of the Image Processing Group of the ETSIT-UPM, where he is currently a full-time Professor and teaches, among other subjects, Digital TV, with special emphasis in MPEG-2 video coding. His research interests include modelling, coding and rendering of 3D objects, and he has been actively involved in several advanced multimedia EU projects such as MoMuSys. Since 1996, he has also followed closely the MPEG SNHC group activities, in which his technical contributions have mainly been related to the subdivision surfaces tools.

Marius Preda received an Engineer Degree in Electronics from the Polytechnical Institute of Bucarest, Romania, where he begun his carrier as Lecturer in Image Processing. He is currently within the Artemis Project Unit from the Institut National des Télécommunications, France. His main research interests include virtual character animation, rendering, and coding. He has been actively involved in MPEG-4 since 1998, especially focusing on video and FBA (Face and Body Animation) coding. His recent research is related to the extension of FBA tools by adding the BBA (Bone-Based Animation) concept in the MPEG-4 version 5 specification.

Tutorial 9 : Broadcasting with MPEG-4

Summary:

The tutorial will focus on the use of MPEG-4 in broadcast scenarios, with demonstrations. Topics covered will include an introduction to MPEG-4 scene description and composition, dynamic MPEG-4 content, the carrousel mechanism for broadcast, live broadcast, and demonstrations of MPEG-4 content. The tutorial will also discuss transport protocols, the ISMA specification, edge servers, and MPEG-4 multicast/unicast.

Speakers:

Yuval Fisher has degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Cornell University. He has consulted and published in various applied and theoretical fields, including data encoding and compression. In 1997 he became involved with MPEG-4 standardization, and has since introduced a number of key technologies and coding schemes into the standard. As a consultant, Dr. Fisher worked on several MPEG-4 implementations for participating MPEG-4 companies, including Rockwell International, Conexant, and France Telecom. He went on to co-found Envivio, a leading provider of end-to-end MPEG-4 solutions, where he is currently Principal Engineer. He is also currently the lead editor of Part 1 of the MPEG-4 specification and was the Chair of the MPEG-4 System Conformance Group and Advanced Text and 2D Graphics Group.

Julien Signès is President and CTO of Envivio as well a co-founder of the company. He is responsible for the company's business and product strategic oversight, and the related engineering efforts. Prior to starting Envivio, Julien managed one of the most advanced MPEG- 4 projects for France Telecom R&D. He chaired the group responsible for the Interactive and graphics portions of the MPEG-4 specification (BIFS) for 4 years, and was awarded 7 patents and the SPIE young Investigator award related to this standardization work. Julien graduated from Ecole Polytechnique and Telecom, Paris.

Tutorial 10 : MPEG-4 Face and Body Animation Authoring Tutorial

Summary:

The creation of animated characters is an expensive and time consuming endeavor using traditional techniques. The MPEG-4 Face and Body Animation (FBA) tools enable a paradigm shift in the creation and delivery of animated characters to the consumer. The result is high quality animation produced at low cost and delivered at very low bitrates. This tutorial will provide an overview of the FBA toolkit and then guide the attendees through the character creation, animation and delivery process using a combination of software applications. No previous experience with character animation is required.

Speakers:

Dr. Eric Petajan is Chief Scientist and Founder of face2face animation, inc and chaired the MPEG-4 Face and Body Animation (FBA) group. Prior to forming face2face, Eric was a Bell Labs researcher where he developed facial motion capture, HD video coding, and interactive graphics systems. Starting in 1989, Eric was a leader in the development of HDTV technology and standards leading up to the US HDTV Grand Alliance. He received a PhD in EE in 1984 and an MS in Physics from the U. of Illinois where he built the first automatic lipreading system. Eric is also associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.

Tutorial 11 : Hands on MPEG-4 compression

Summary:

This tutorial brings it all into the real world, looking at several released and beta tools for MPEG-4 compression and playback. We'll compare the results between some different encoding tools, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. We'll also look at different players. Lastly, we'll discuss the MPEG-4 Profiles and Levels that look to be adopted in the short term.

Speakers:

Ben Waggoner spent his years at Hampshire College getting a BA in neuropsychology by day, working on student films by night, and hacking on his Mac Iici in the wee hours, which confused his academic advisor to no end, but proved to be the perfect background for compression. He compressed his first video file in 1989, and cofounded Journeyman Digital in 1994, becoming on of the nation's first full-time compressionists. He later founded Terran Interactive's Consulting Services division.

Ben now runs Interframe Media, a compressed video consulting, training, and encoding company, advising clients on compression technology, automation, and integration issues. He also appears at industry conferences, and is a contributing editor for DV Magazine.

WEMP4 Panel Session: Convergence After the Hype

Participants

Jae-Seob Shin (Samsung)
David benham (Cisco)
Gary Greenbaum (Real)
4th participant to be confirmed
Moderation by Rob Koenen

Summary:

Convergence has been a popular discussion topic for the last 10 years. Everybody would have one superbroadband connection into their home and there would be a single convergence device that melds the TV and the PC and even more goodies. Also businesses were supposed to converge, especially communications and entertainment. Call this vertical convergence if you will.

Rather, we have more digital delivery networks than ever today, and we have ever-more, different devices, from watches with Internet access to digital HDTVs.

It took the dot-com bust to take down the last standing remains of the nineties' convergence hype, but now that the rubble has cleared, we can see that convergence is happening. It is not the vertical melting-pot convergence, but economically sensible, horizontal convergence. Open technologies that can be re-used across networks and devices. TCP, Java, XML, MPEG-4, you name them. Horizontal convergence is what drove the development of MPEG-4.

But there is more convergence, and it is in devices after all. No, we still will not have one single device that solves all your problems (and more), but we do start having devices that start combining hitherto disparate functions. Phones with browsers. Game stations and DVD players with Internet access. TVs with an application engine. Etc. etc.

This panel session will explore "convergence after the death of convergence". what will the digital multimedia landscape look like in 5-10 years from now? What will the role of technologies like MPEG(-4) be?

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