Pervasive Visual Communications
Nikil Jayant, Mostafa Ammar, Constantinos Dovrolis,
Ellen Zegura, Chin Lee, Ghassan Al Regib, Ed Price
Rich visual content demands high levels of bandwidth in spite of recent advances in video compression and the availability of compact rule-based information for enabling games content. As the communications industry rolls out services that it calls triple play (data, voice and video) and quadruple play (triple play plus mobility), the pervasive sharing of high-bandwidth video poses significant problems, especially in the public Internet and wireless segments of the network. In addition, the increasing trend of interactive games has implications both on network bandwidth (especially in mobile networks) and on uplink-downlink asymmetry (as in the last mile to the home). The pervasive visual communications thrust addresses the above issues with a combination of consortium and bilateral research. Projects (current and imminent) include:
• automatic evaluation of video quality
• message ferrying for mobile video communications
• testbed for evaluating networking and human factors issues in gaming
• advanced video compression
• video-centric IP-network architecture
• techniques for low-latency distribution of niche content