Interactive Media with Personal Networked Devices (INTERMEDIA-NoE)
There have been considerable efforts to have Audio/Video systems and applications converge, in particular in home environments with homes as spaces of convergence, and for nomadic users with advanced mobile devices as points of convergence. These trends are important but also have limitations that we seek to address and overcome: home-centric systems fail to account for increased mobility and the desire to provide continuous service across spatial boundaries outside the home; device-centric convergence, e.g. in 3G phones, supports nomadic use but provides a very limited user experience as no single device and interface will fit many different applications well.

In this NoE, we seek to progress beyond home and device-centric convergence toward truly user-centric convergence of multimedia. Our vision is The User as Multimedia Central: the user as the point at which services (multimedia applications) and the means for interacting with them (devices and interfaces) converge. Key to our vision is that users are provided with a personalized interface and with personalized content independently of the particular set of physical devices they have available for interaction (on the body, or in their environment), and independently of the physical space in which they are situated. Our approach to this vision is to investigate a flexible wearable platform that supports dynamic composition of wearable devices, an ad-hoc connection to devices in the environment, a continuous access to multimedia networks, as well as adaptation of content to devices and user context.

The P2P-Next project will run over four years, and plans to conduct a large-scale technical trial of new media applications running on a wide range of consumer devices. If successful, this ambitious project could create a platform that would enable audiences to stream and interact with live content via a PC or set top box. In addition, it is our intention to allow audiences to build communities around their favourite content via a fully personalized system. 

This technology could potentially be built into Video on Demand (VOD) services in the future and plans are underway to test the system for major broadcasting events.

The project has an open approach towards sharing results. All core software technology will be available as open source, enabling new business models. P2P-Next will also address a number of outstanding challenges related to content delivery over the internet, including technical, legal, regulatory, security, business and commercial issues.

Scalable Video Coding (SVC), most importantly the recent Scalable Extensions of the highly successful ITU H.264 / ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC video codec standard, is a promising technology to solve one of the fundamental problems of providing TV and VoD services over the Internet: the diversity of networks and devices, by means of which these services will be offered and consumed. SVC basically allows easy retrieval of different qualities (and bitrates) of a given media content by simple extraction or truncation of certain segments from a single, highest quality content bitstream. Thus, it is believed that SVC represents the missing key factor to enable high quality delivery of on-demand and live content over the Internet, independent from the used end device and the speed of the Internet connection.

RiS, the industry partner in this proposal, is providing both on-demand and live TV services over the Internet via their myTV platform, which faces the problems of all IPTV architectures when serving diverse clients over diverse networks, as described above. Klagenfurt University, the research partner, has significant research results and several software prototypes on SVC streaming and adaptation and has performed multimedia communication and adaptation projects for several years both on a basic research level (FWF projects) and on an applied research level (EU projects). Based on these grounds, the IPTV platform and requirements of the industry partner and the SVC-related streaming and adaptation expertise of the research partner, this project is proposed to pursue the following goals:

1. The main objective is to develop an innovative solution to the above IPTV problem, i.e., to design, implement, and evaluate an SVC-based IPTV architecture which eliminates or at least reduces the problems of the current IPTV architecture of RiS and to integrate the solution into their platform. This will enable users to consume the media contents at the best possible quality regardless of their specific network and device.

2. A second objective is to realize a specific application of SVC-enabled media consumption, namely a session mobility scenario, where a specific media session is transferred from one end device to another, e.g., in a home scenario where a set top box performs adaptation of the migrated video stream to the new usage context (e.g., device).

3. The final objective is to identify and explore further novel application scenarios and uses of "adaptive media distribution" based on SVC. Realizing such applications will be beyond the scope of this project, but will open new directions for research and/or product developments for the partners.

The work performed in this project is part of a European project of the Celtic Initiative [http://www.celtic-initiative.org] called SCALNET (Scalable Video Coding Impact on Networks). SCALNET was approved by Celtic and received the Celtic Label for Call 5. (The most relevant information on SCALNET is appended to this proposal.) The approval of the SCALNET project shows that it is relevant to the Celtic Initiative, which is supported by most of the major European players in communication technologies.

The Austrian Network for eTourism (ANET) aims at developing a competence network in the area of e-tourism by funding related projects with partners both from industry and science. Thus, each ANET project has to be carried by at least one industrial and one scientific partner, whereas the industrial partner is required to supply an annual membership fee. Depending on the amount of research, the project is funded by either 35 or 60 percent from the federation and local authority. The remaining unfunded 40 or 65 percent need to be carried by the industrial partner, whereas usually 1/3 is required to be paid in cash, and 2/3 may be payments in kind. The Department of Information Technology represents the scientific partner in the ANET project "Tourguide for web and mobile devices", accompanied by the industrial partner Minimundus Klagenfurt, developing the work package 5 ("Adaptive Streaming") from July 1st, 2005 to March 31st, 2006. The overall aim of the project is to develop a guidance system for tourists with a strong focus on mobility and multimedia.

ANTARES is not only the brightest star in the constellation Scorpio, in this case it stands for Arbitrary NeTwork ARchitecturES. ANTARES is the project title of a research cooperation with the company Frequentis, Vienna, which aims at designing and implementing a future-proof architecture for Dispatchers used in Control Centres in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) and Public Safety environments to satisfy the steadily increasing need for system stability, security, safety and flexibility of such systems. Dispatching solutions are employed all over the world having many different characteristics. In principle, these solutions can be divided into four main components. The first component is a Human Machine Interface (HMI) which is responsible for the interaction with the user (human dispatcher). The second component of a Dispatcher system represents the interfaces to communication networks and devices and can be called the “heart” of such a system. This component brings together the peculiar characteristics of such interfaces and networks and provides a standardised functionality to the HMI. Components three and four are used for data reduction and data processing, respectively, to make sure that the end user is always able to dispose of the latest and most important information necessary for her/him to do her/his job. The design of an innovative Dispatcher in ANTARES shall be done in a way to avoid today’s standard technology of using a central component and to use as communication platform a network architecture that provides the necessary parameters regarding Quality of Service (QoS) and flexibility. The major focus of the project therefore is: routing and communication protocols, in particular in ad-hoc networks, and the identification and addressing of cross-layer aspects with the aim to transport multimedia content (especially voice) in conjunction with more common data through a heterogeneous network (i.e., every node may provide different services) in a timely and reliable manner.

Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Hermann Hellwagner
Ao. Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Inf. Dr. Harald Kosch
Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Michael Kropfberger
Dipl.-Ing. Michael Ransburg
Univ.-Ass. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Christian Timmerer
Mag. Michael Zufferey

Strategic Objectives addressed: 2.3.1.8  Networked Audiovisual Systems and Home Platforms Project Abstract DANAE proposes to address the dynamic and distributed adaptation of scalable multimedia content in a context-aware environment. Its objectives are to specify, develop, integrate and validate in a testbed a complete framework able to provide end-to-end quality of (multimedia) service at a minimal cost to the end-user. An application will be specifically developed and implemented on a demonstrator, to illustrate the new service concepts pioneered by the Project. The work will cover: (i) the definition of scalable media formats with their associated meta-data, (ii) their adaptation to the session context for making full featured distributed multimedia scene adaptation through global optimization of audio, video, 2D graphics, 2D/3D virtual characters and (iii) the transport and delivery of multimedia content to the end-user. Error resilient and efficient (in terms of bitrate and required processing power in the player) coding schemes will be studied to cater for the specific constraints introduced by the existing multiplicity of networks and terminals. The interrelationship of content adaptation and scalability with Digital Rights Management (DRM) and charging issues will also be explored. As an outcome, an advanced MPEG-21 chain will be produced. Finally potential new business models will be analyzed that would allow assessment of the commercial viability of the new services pioneered by DANAE. DANAE is proposed for a duration of 30 months. After specification and development, all individual key buildingblocks implementing the novel concepts and technical features will be integrated, and technically validated in a central end-to-end test-bed which will then be used to demonstrate the novel service types with the developed application. DANAE work will be based on the existing MPEG standards which however need to evolve so that they cover the new technical aspects pioneered by the project. The DANAE partners commit themselves to actively contribute to this evolution.

The ENTHRONE project proposes an integrated management solution that covers the entire audio-visual service distribution chain, including protected content handling, distribution across networks and reception at user terminals. The aim is not to unify or impose a strategy on each individual entity of the chain, but to harmonise their functionality, in order to support an end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) architecture over heterogeneous networks, applied to a variety of audio-visual services that are delivered to various user terminals.

To meet its objectives, the project is relying on an efficient, distributed and open management architecture for the end-to-end delivery chain. The MPEG-21 data model is used to provide the common support for implementing and managing the resources functionalities. Furthermore, the MPEG-21 framework implementation in the project will contribute to the realisation of Universal Multimedia Access (UMA), which aims at achieving interoperable transparent access to multimedia resources from any type of client terminal or network and so, the rapid growing for online exchange of rich media resources.

The ENTHRONE project addresses the scalable content generation and protection, dynamic adaptation, distribution and usage of multimedia content, context and resources in geographically distributed environments. This broad, heterogeneous distribution model motivates ENTHRONE?s concern with end-to-end QoS performance, at both user and network levels, and with the mapping between these levels.

A high-level goal of the ENTHRONE project is to bridge the divide between the content provision and the networking worlds, resulting in cross-industry co-ordination on both network and content management issues, and bringing focus to mutually advantageous standards such as MPEG-21.

ENTHRONE aims to support the convergence of existing and emerging technologies, including broadband, mobile, broadcast and new media across all ICT sectors, by creating a new open platform for the delivery of media over all networks.

ENTHRONE will deliver an open and flexible end-to-end architecture that enables equally open and flexible business models, so that Service Providers can build their own tailored services according to user requirements, operating in a converged value chain of Networks Operators, Broadcasters and Content Providers. In this sense, ENTHRONE will help leveraging the transition from a vertical to a horizontal market by levelling the playing field in the audio-visual market, generating competition, enhancing the roles of the traditional players, and creating new roles, even new players, with viable business models.
The derivation of strong business models for supporting the access to streamed/stored audio-visual media and/or the middleware components from anywhere and for any terminal device is an integrated outcome of the project.

ENTHRONE is committed to demonstrate its results in a real and large-scale pilot, with the ultimate goal of bringing its results to the market.

ST Microelectronics (STM) and the Dept. of Information Technology (ITEC) of Klagenfurt University will jointly develop, test, and demonstrate the use of MPEG-21 Digital Item Adap-tation (DIA) metadata and concepts for streaming and adapting SVC-encoded video streams. Here, SVC denotes the Scalable Extensions to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC coding standard that is currently in the final phase of standardization in the Joint Video Team (JVT), a group of experts delegated by the ITU VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG standardization groups.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a generic meta language used to create self-describing data formats suitable for specific areas of application. Schema languages such as XML Schema (XSD) are a suitable tool for describing a concrete language based on XML. The combination of XML and XML Schema has found significant use in both, industry standards and ad-hoc non-standardized industry applications.
A major value of XML-based solutions derives from the combination of extensibility and the self-describing nature of the underlying meta-language: By completely identifying all data elements with namespace and name values, XML on the one hand makes it easy to add extensions to an application format. At the same time, it reduces the necessity to completely agree and specify all communication formats and details for the sake of compatibility, since all commonly understood data items can be readily identified through the namespaces and names. As such, XML is an enabling technology for loosely coupling heterogeneous devices or applications and consequently is most successful in areas where such loose coupling is desired.
Unfortunately, this generic, self-describing property also introduces a lot of structural inefficiency to the data formats (and the appropriate processing software), to an extent that the cost of XML becomes prohibitive for many applications. The inefficiency is considered structural because it stems from the structure of the underlying data format itself and can only partially be compensated for by improved implementation techniques. A successful technique to improve implementation efficiency of XML is therefore to make use of that structure, e.g. as described by an appropriate XML Schema definition. One such approach is MPEG-B / BiM, an efficient, standardized, and schema-based XML representation. MPEG-B has been incorporated into application standards, e.g. for the purpose of efficiently representing broadcast meta data.
The purpose of this cooperation is to implement and evaluate the use of MPEG-B in application standards. Based on an in-house implementation of MPEG-B, BimCpp, support for application standards such as DVB IPDC ESG or TV-Anytime is to be implemented. Additionally, the efficiency of BiM is to be quantitatively evaluated with respect to the effect of different parameterizations of the BimCpp algorithms and by comparison to other XML-based processing methods.
Project deliverables:
1) An adaption of the BimCpp implementation suitable for processing real-world application formats, such as DVB IPDC ESG, TV-Anytime, or an in-house industry-used XML-based format.
2) A quantitative evaluation, which compares the result of BimCpp with different parameterizations and competing XML-based processing methods.