Section: Application Domains

Multimedia communication

Networked multimedia is expected to play a key role in the development of 3G and beyond 3G (i.e. all IP-based) networks, by leveraging higher bandwidth, IP-based ubiquitous service provisioning across heterogeneous infrastructures, and capabilities of rich-featured terminal devices. However, networked multimedia presents a number of challenges beyond existing networking and source coding capabilities. Among the problems to be addressed is the transmission of large quantities of information with delay constraints on heterogeneous, time-varying communication environments with non-guaranteed quality of service (QoS). It is now a common understanding that QoS provisioning for multimedia applications such as video or audio does require a loosening and a re-thinking of the end-to-end and layer separation principle. In that context, the joint source-channel coding and the cross-layer paradigms set the foundations for the design of efficient solutions to the above challenges.

In parallel, emerging multimedia communication applications such as wireless video (e.g. mobile cameras), multi-sensors, multi-camera vision systems, surveillance systems are placing additionnal constraints on compression solutions, such as limited power consumption due to limited handheld battery power. The traditional balance of complex encoder and simple decoder may need to be reversed for these particular applications. In addition, wireless camera sensors capture and need to large volume of redundant data wighout information exhange between the sensors. The redundancy and correlation between the captured data can then only be removed on the receiving end. Distributed source coding is a recent research area which aims at addressing these needs.