Given the strong impact of standardization in the sector of networked multimedia, TEMICS, in partnership with industrial companies, seeks to promote its results in standardization (IETF, JPEG, MPEG). While aiming at generic approaches, some of the solutions developed are applied to practical problems in partnership with industry (Thomson, France Télécom) or in the framework of national projects (RNRT COSOCATI, DIPHONET, EIRE, VIP, COSINUS, RIAM-COPARO, RNTL DOMUS-VIDEUM, ANR-ESTIVALE, ANR-MEDIEVALS, ANR-ESSOR, ANR-ICOS-HD, Futurimages) and European projects (IST-BUSMAN, IST-OZONE, IST-DANAE, IST-DISCOVER, IST-SIMILAR, IST-NEWCOM++). The application domains addressed by the project are networked multimedia applications (on wired or wireless Internet) via their various requirements and needs in terms of compression, of resilience to channel noise, or of advanced functionalities such as navigation, protection and authentication.

Contracts and Grants involving industry

Industrial contracts

TEMICS has five Cifre contracts with industrial partners:

• Cifre contract with France Telecom RD
  Cifre contract with France Telecom RD in the context of the Ph.D of Nathalie Cammas in the area of video coding using active meshes and 3D wavelets. Active meshes are used in order to model the deformation of objects in a scene.
• Cifre contract with France Telecom RD
  Cifre contract with France Telecom RD in the context of the Ph.D of Raphaele Balter in the area of 3D-model based coding of video sequences.
• CRE contract with France Telecom RD
  CRE contract with France Telecom RD in the context of the Ph.D of Gael Sourimant on the area of 3D reconstruction of urban scenes by fusion GPS, GIS and video data.
• CRE contract with France Telecom RD
  On the problem of distributed source coding. The objective is to investigate this new coding paradigm and assess its potential for compression with mobile light-weight encoding systems.
• Cifre contract with Thomson Multimedia R&D
  Cifre contract with Thomson Multimedia R&D in the context of the Ph.D of Guillaume Boisson in the area of scalable video coding based on motion-compensated spatiotemporal wavelets. The focus in 2004 has been on adaptive motion-compensated temporal filtering and on efficient and scalable coding of corresponding motion fields.
• CIFRE contract with France Telecom
  on the problem of 3D video representation (Oct.07-Sept.10). This contract with France Telecom R\&D (started in October 2007) aims at investigating the data representation for 3DTV and Free Viewpoint TV applications. 3DTV applications consist in 3D relief rendering and Free Viewpoint TV applications consist in an interactive navigation inside the content. As an input, multiple color videos and depth maps are given to our system. The goal is to process this data so as to obtain a compact representation suitable for 3D TV and Free Viewpoint functionalities. In 2008, we have developed a multi-view video representation based on a global geometric model composed with a soup of polygons. In 2009, the construction of the representation has been improved in order to reduce the number of quads and eliminate artifacts around depth discontinuities as well as the corresponding rendering approach (see Section \ref{3Drepresentation}). A coding algorithm adapted to the polygon soup representation has been developed. The performance of the coding scheme has been compared with the encoding of the depth maps using JPEG2000.
• CIFRE contract with France Telecom
  on the problem of spectral deconvolution for video compression and protection (Nov.06- Oct.09). This CIFRE contract concerns the Ph.D of Aurélie martin. The objective of the Ph.D. is to develop image spectral deconvolution methods for prediction in video compression schemes. Closed-loop spatial prediction has indeed been widely used in video compression standards (H.261/H.263, MPEG-1/2/4, H.264). In H.264 used for digital terrestrial TV, the prediction is done by simply ``propagating'' the pixel values along the specified direction. This approach is suitable in presence of contours, the directional mode chosen corresponds to the orientation of the contour. However, it fails in more complex textured areas. The spatial image prediction approach developed in the context of this collaboration relies on sparse approximations based on matching pursuit algorithms. In a first step dictionaries based on classical waveforms such as DCT and DFT have been considered. In 2009, a method to enhance to dictionaries taking into account a phase shift between the signal to be approximated and the waveforms taken as dictionary atoms has been developed showing further rate saving (up to 9%), when integrated in the JVT (ITU/MPEG joint video team) KTA software.
• Collaboration with Alcatel
  on robust video compression (Nov. 2008 - Oct. 2011). In the framework of the joint research lab between Alcatel-Lucent and INRIA, we participate in the ADR (action de recherche) Selfnets (or Self optimizing wireless networks). More precisely, we collaborate with the Alcatel-Lucent team on a self adaptive video codec. The goal is to design a video codec, which has the intrinsic knowledge of the dynamic video quality requirements, and which is able to self-adapt to the existing underlying transport network. In this approach, the video codec has to include: Means to dynamically "sense" the underlying transport channel (e.g BER, PER, Markov model), Means at the encoder to adapt dynamically the output bitrate to the estimated channel throughput and to the effective transport QoS while maintaining the video quality requirements, Means at the decoder to be resilient to any remaining packet losses.

TEMICS also supervises DRT projects in collaborations with industrial partners:

• H. Nicolas supervises the Degree of Technological Research ("Diplome de Recherche Technologique" (DRT)) of Fabrice Templon realized at NEXTREAM on the subject "Development of graphic representations of MPEG-4 bitstreams and application to the optimization of the choice of the coding modes and parameters".
• H. Nicolas supervises the Degree of Technological Research ("Diplome de Recherche Technologique" (DRT)) of Lila Huguenel realized at Thomson on the subject "MPEG-4 AVC video compression based on regions of interest".

National contracts

• RNRT VIP
  Contributed by: Christine Guillemot, Thomas Guionnet
  Convention number: 2 01 A 0650 00 000MC 01 1
  Title: Video over wireless IP
  Partners: Comsys, ENSEA, France Telecom R&D, Irisa/Inria-Rennes, INRIA-Sophia, ENST-Paris, Universite Paris-6, Thales Communication.
  Funding: Ministry of industry
  Period: Nov.01-Apr.04
  

  The project objective is to design error resilient video coding solutions and joint sourcechannel coding techniques for robust transmission of video signals over wireless IP networks. TEMICS contributes to VIP by designing estimation algorithms for robust decoding of arithmetic codes in presence of channel noise, and by integrating these techniques in a fine grain scalable video coder and decoder. TEMICS also studies redundant wavelet transforms for erasure-resilient coding and decoding of video signals.

• RNRT DIPHONET
  Contributed by: Gaetan Le Guelvouit, Sophie Le Delliou, Teddy Furon
  Convention number: 2 01 A 0704 00 000MC 01 1
  Title: Picture broadcasting over the Internet
  Partners: Canon, CNRS (L2S), INRIA, Andia Press
  Funding: Ministry of industry
  Period: Jan.02-Jun.04
  

  The aim of the Diphonet project is to develop protection and tracing tools for applications of professional images delivery over the Internet.The watermarking technique is used to insert copyright information as well as meta-data in order to trace the origin of a picture. The watermarking technique based on game theory reported in sub-section tatouage has been evaluated and optimized against intentional attacks and potential de-synchronizations.

• RNRT DOMUS-VIDEUM
  Contributed by: Anne Manoury, Henri Nicolas
  Convention number: 2 02 C 0100 00 00 MPR 01 1
  Title: Indexation, advanced visualisation and video content-based access.
  Partners: Inria (METISS, TEMICS, VISTA project teams), Thomson Multimedia, Ecole polytechnique de Nantes, INA, SFRS.
  Funding: Ministry of industry
  Period: Dec.01-Jul.04
  

  The aim of the project is to develop tools for indexing, content-based access and for advanced visualization of videos. We designed a technique for structuring a video sequence in a set of hyper-scenes, where each hyper-scene gathers similar scenes. This method is based on an initial scene shot decomposition assumed to be available. The criteria used to merge the initial shots are based on the use of 1-D mosaic representations (each initial shot is represented using two 1-D mosaic images). The similarity between two scenes is therefore evaluated by comparing their mosaic images. Such comparisons are done here using global statistical similarities, and a region-based matching criterion. These different criteria are embedded in a decision process. The tool has been applied to MPEG-2 compressed content. The 1-D mosaic images are thus computed using the MPEG-2 motion vectors. Then they are approximated by a polygonal representation in order to simplify the comparison process. The video structure is therefore obtained using a clustering algorithm. Experiments show that satisfactory hyper-scene structuration can be obtained.

• RNRT EIRE
  Contributed by: Christine Guillemot, Henri Nicolas
  Convention number: 2 02 C 0099 00 31324 01 1
  Title: Optimization of image compression algorithms based on JPEG-2000.
  Partners: Inria, Thales, I3S, CRIL Technology, ENSTA, IRCOM
  Funding: Ministry of industry
  Period: Nov.01-Feb.04
  

  The project objectives are to develop image and video compression algorithms with optimized rate-allocation algorithms and supporting fine grain scalability. TEMICS focuses on the scalable video compression aspects. The algorithm setting the basis for our contributions is based on a 3-D spatio-temporal decomposition of each Group Of Frames (GOF). A motion estimation based on a quadtree decomposition is incorporated in the temporal filtering in order to obtain a more efficient temporal de-correlation. The spatial decomposition is similar to the technique used in JPEG-2000. The obtained quantized coefficients are therefore coded using a 3-D EBCOT coding method. Furthermore, two GOF coding modes (Intra and Inter) are introduced to take into account the correlation between two successive GOF. The GOF length is chosen in function of the temporal variations between the successive GOF.

• RIAM-COPARO
  Contributed by: Christine Guillemot, Marion Jeanne, Florelle Pauchet, Wenxian Yang
  Title: Codeur H.264 sur architecture parallèle programmable.
  Partners: ENVIVIO, Irisa/Inria-Rennes, Vitec.
  Funding: Ministry of industry
  Period: Sept.04-June.06
  The H.264 standard has been retained as the compression format for terrestrial television. In that context, the objectives of the COPARO project are to develop: a parallel programmable architecture for real-time H.264 based video compression (Vitec); an H.264 real-time video encoder (Envivio); solutions of error resilience for H.264 based video compression and of scalability (INRIA). One of the key components bringing the high compression performance in the H.264 solution is a new entropy coding scheme named CABAC (Context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding). However, the CABAC algorithm suffers from sensitivity to transmission noise. TEMICS is bringing to the project algorithmic tools, allowing to make the CABAC encoding technique (and therefore the H.264 video compression solution) resilient to transmission errors typical of wireless links. The principle of soft source decoding is to use the structure and/or the statistics related to the source, encoder and channel models in order to get an optimal, or a nearly optimal, estimation of the transmitted symbols. The techniques developed concern soft-in soft-out decoding of arithmetic codes and in-line estimation of the source statistics for variable length codes. The work includes theoretical studies as well as validation in the H264
• RNRT-COSINUS
  Contributed by: Christelle Chamaret, Laurent Guillo, Adrien Schadle
  Title: COSINUS (COmmunications de Services temps-réel / IP dans uN réseaU Sans fil) / Real-time IP service communication in a wireless network .
  Partners: . Alcatel CIT, Institut EURECOM, IRISA /INIRIA Rennes, France Télécom, GET/ENST Bretagne, Thales Communications.
  Funding: Ministry of industry
  Period: Dec.04-Sept.07
  
• RIAM-ESTIVALE
  Contributed by: Caroline Fontaine
  Title: Secured exchanges for video transfer, in line with legislation and economy.
  Partners: LIS (INPG), ADIS (Univ. Paris~XI), CERDI (Univ. Parix~XI), LSS (Univ. Paris~XI/Supelec), Basic-Lead, Nextamp, SACD.
  Funding: ANR
  Period: Dec.05-Dec.09
  

  ESTIVALE is a project dealing with the diffusion of video on demand in several contexts: from personal use to professionnal use. People involved in the project are from different communities: signal processing and security, economists and jurist. The goal of the project is to design technical solutions for securing this delivery, through DRM and watermarking tools, and to remain consistent with the economical and juridical studies and demands. In 2009, the TEMICS project-team has contributed on the design of a practical efficient fingerprinting scheme for video.

• RIAM-MEDIEVALS
  Contributed by: Caroline Fontaine, Teddy Furon
  Title: Watermarking and Visual Encryption for Video and Audio on Demand legal diffusion.
  Partners: MEDIALIVE, LSS (Univ. Paris~XI/Supelec), GET-INT, THOMSON Software et Technologies Solutions, AMOSSYS SAS.
  Funding: ANR
  Period: Dec.07-Dec.10
  

  MEDIEVALS is a project dealing with the diffusion of video or audio on demand. MEDIALIVE developed a software to secure this delivery through visual encryption, and the goal of the project is to add watermarking/fingerprinting in the process to improve the security of the delivered content. In 2009, the TEMICS project-team has contributed on the rationale of the new software architecture. We performed tests to study the best articulation between visual encryption, watermarking and anti-collusion codes.

• ANR-ESSOR
  Contributed by: Christine Guillemot, Aline Roumy, Velotiaray Toto-Zarasoa
  Title: Distributed Video Coding.
  Partners: CNRS/LSS, ENST-Paris, CNRS/I3S.
  Funding: ANR
  Period: Nov.06-Oct.09
  

  Compared with predictive coding, distributed video compression holds a number of promises for mobile applications: a more flexible coder/decoder complexity balancing, increased error resilience, and the capability to exploit inter-view correlation, with limited inter-camera communication, in multiview set-ups. However, despite the growing number of research contributions in the past, key questions remain to bring monoview and multi-view DVC to a level of maturity closer to predictive coding: estimating at encoder or decoder the {\em virtual} correlation channel from unknown - or only partially known - data; finding the best SI at the decoder for data not - or only partially - known. Solutions to the above questions have various implications on coder/decoder complexity balancing, on delay and communication topology, and rate-distortion performance. These questions are being addressed by the ANR-ESSOR project. The TEMICS project-team more specifically contributes on the design of Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv coding tools as well as on the design of robust and joint source-channel distributed coding strategies. More specifically, in 2009, the TEMICS project-team has pursued the development of a practical distributed video compression schemes based on LDPC codes, improving its performance by designing estimation and decoding algorithms which allow us exploiting both the non-uniformity distribution and the memory of the correlated sources present in the video signal.

• Futurimages
  Contributed by: Christine Guillemot, Claude Labit, Vincent Jantet, Luce Morin, Gael Sourimant
  Title: 3D multi-view video transmission and restitution.
  Partners: Thomson R\&d France, Thomson Grass Valley, Orange Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Irisa/Inria-Rennes, IRCCyN, Polymorph Software, BreizhTech, Artefacto, Bilboquet, France 3 Ouest, TDF.
  Funding: Ministry of industry and Region
  Period: Oct.08-Aug.10
  

  The Futurim@ages project studies coding, distribution and rendering aspects of future television video formats: 3DTV, high-dynamic range videos, and full-HD TV. In this context, TEMICS focuses on compact representations and restitution of multi-view videos. Multi-view videos provide interesting 3D functionalities, such as 3DTV (visualization of 3D videos on auto-stereoscopic screen devices) or Free Viewpoint Video (FFV, i.e. the ability to change the camera point of view while the video is visualized). However, multi-view videos represent a huge amount of redundant data compared with standard videos, hence the need to develop efficient compression algorithms. Stereoscopic or auto-stereoscopic devices display very specific camera viewpoints, which should be generated even if they do not correspond to acquisition viewpoints. Artifacts such as ghosting or bad modelled occlusions must be dealt with to render high quality 3D videos. In the Futurim@ages project, we also address the problem of depth map retrieval from multi-view and from monocular videos of static scenes. For the latter case, we rebuilt the Structure from Motion part of the 3D video codec developed in the team by integrating the lattest state-of-the-art vision algorithms. As for the multi-view case, we developed a new depth map estimation algorithm which aims at preserving depth discontinuities, which is necessary to render correct virtual views of the scene. In the near future, we plan to compare this software to the Depth Estimation Reference Software (DERS) from the MPEG 3DV group, in terms of virtual views synthesis quality.

• ANR-ICOS-HD
  Contributed by: Christine Guillemot, Joaquin Zepeda
  Title: Scalable Indexing and Compression Scalable for High Definition TV.
  Partners: Université de Bordeaux, CNRS/I3S.
  Funding: ANR
  Period: Jan.07-Dec.10
  

  The objective of the project is to develop new solutions of scalable description for High Definition video content to facilitate their editing, their acces via heterogeneous infrastructures (terminals, networks). The introduction of HDTV requires adaptations at different levels of the production and delivery chain. The access to the content for editing or delivery requires associating local or global spatio-temporal descritors to the content. The TEMICS project-team contributed in particular on the study of new forms of signal representation amenable to both compression and feature extraction (see Section \ref{description}). A new concept called visual sentences which can be seen as a sparse extension of the concept of visual words has been introduced and assessed for image retrieval in large databases. Methods for computing a similarity measure between descriptors has been designed for the approximate nearest neighbor search task required in content based image retrieval systems. A novel method of dictionary construction has also been developed for this problem of joint compression/description problem.

European contracts

• IST BUSMAN
  Contributed by: Vincent Bottreau, Jonathan Delhumeau, Teddy Furon, Christine Guillemot
  Convention number: 1 02 C 0186 00 00MPR 00 5
  Title: Bringing user satisfaction to media access networks.
  Partners: Bristish Telecom, Framepool, HHI, INRIA, Motorola, QMUL, Telefonica, University of Munich.
  Funding: CEE
  Period: Apr.02-Sep.04
  

  BUSMAN develops and integrates indexing and watermarking techniques to ease the search and use of video content. TEMICS contribution is focused on watermarking techniques to enrich video content by hiding meta-data. Different levels of robustness to a range of attacks such as transcoding required for transmission in heterogeneous networks, and compression at various rates must be provided. A first version of the software based on state-of-the-art techniques has been delivered for integration in the BUSMAN demonstrator comprising an authoring tool as well as a client-server delivery architecture over fixed and mobile networks. The technique should evolve to incorporate side-informed embedding solutions in order to improve the performance.

• IST OZONE
  Contributed by: Christine Guillemot, Henri Nicolas
  Convention number: 1 01 A0672 00 000MC 00 5
  Title: New technologies and services for emerging nomadic societies.
  Partners: Inria, Thomson Multimedia, Philips, IMEC, Epictoid.
  Funding: CEE
  Period: Nov.01-May.04
  

  The goal of the OZONE project is to develop a pervasive computing and communication framework which will bring relevant information and services to the individual, anywhere and at anytime. The OZONE project can be viewed as the first step towards concrete ambient intelligence applications. Our contributions to the OZONE project is related to the transmission of the video data throughout the OZONE network. High quality performance of the video transmission system is essential to guarantee the quality of service required by users needs in the context of such applications. Our contribution is related to the study and development of a video transmission platform incorporating mechanisms in support of end-to-end QoS such as congestion control and loss control. The software corresponding to the video transmission loss and network congestion control has been delivered to the project's partners.

• FP6 IST NoE SIMILAR
  Contributed by: Christine Guillemot, Luce Morin, Henri Nicolas
  Convention number: 104C05310031324005
  Title: European research taskforce creating human-machine interfaces SIMILAR to human-human communication.
  Partners: around 40 partners from 16 countries.
  Funding: CEE
  Period: Jan.04-Dec.07
  The TEMICS team is involved in the network of excellence SIMILAR federating European fundamental research on multimodal human-machine interfaces and contributes on the following aspects:
  • In the context of 3D modelling of video sequences we have focused on an hybrid representation mixing 2D and 3D representations of video data. Cylindrical and spherical mosaics are used for unified coding and visualization of 2D and 3D data. Such an approach allows to make no assumption on the camera acquisition path, and still provides the benefits of 3D functionalities for virtual reality applications.
  • Shadow and light source detection and analysis techniques have been developed. They are used to artificially create cast shadows of natural objects inserted in a video sequence. These methods will be applied to the mixing of 2D (original and mosaic images, video objects) and 3 D (synthetic objects and 3D model) video data.
  • TEMICS is contributing on a distributed coding framework in a context of multimodality and coordinating with EPFL a working group dealing with the development of an information theoretic for analysis and representation of multimodalities.
• FP6 IST STREP DANAE
  Contributed by: Vincent Bottreau, Christine Guillemot, Herve Jegou, Gagan Rath.
  Title: Dynamic and distributed Adaptation of scalable multimedia content in a context-Aware Environment.
  Partners: ENST, France Telecom, Imperial College London (ICL), Inria, Museon, Siemens, T-systems, University of Aachen, University of Geneva, University of Klagenfurt.
  Funding: CEE
  Period: Jan.04-Jun.06
  

  The TEMICS team is involved in the STREP DANAE addressing issues of 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. TEMICS contributes on the aspects of fine grain scalable video coding and on the study of new source codes for increasing the error resiliency of the scalable video coder while preserving its compression and scalable properties. In collaboration with other DANAE partners, TEMICS contributes to different core experiments defined in the context of MPEG-21/SVC: a core experiment on spatial transforms, on error resilience and on coding with multi-rate adaptability.

• FP6 NoE-ECRYPT
  Contributed by: Caroline Fontaine
  Title: Collaborative research in cryptography and data hiding.
  Funding: CEE
  Period: Feb.04-Jul.08
  

  ECRYPT aims at stimulating European research in the area of cryptography and data hiding. It is splitted into several virtual labs, the one concerning us being called WAVILA: WAtermarking VIrtual LAb. Our contribution is the design of a practical efficient fingerprinting scheme for video content.

• FP6 STREP-DISCOVER
  Contributed by: Christine Guillemot, Denis Kubasov, Khaled Lajnef, Simon Malinowski, Jayanth Nayak, Gagan Rath
  Title: Distributed Coding for Video Service.
  Partners: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Universität Hannover (UH), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA-Rennes) Università di Brescia (UB).
  Funding: CEE
  Period: Sept.05-Aug.07
  

  Video coding solutions so far have been adopting a paradigm where it is the task of the encoder to explore the source statistics, leading to a complexity balance where complex encoders interact with simpler decoders. This paradigm is strongly dominated and determined by applications such as broadcasting, video on demand, and video streaming. Distributed Video Coding (DVC) adopts a completely different coding paradigm by giving the decoder the task to exploit - partly or wholly - the source statistics to achieve efficient compression. This change of paradigm also moves the encoder-decoder complexity balance, allowing the provision of efficient compression solutions with simple encoders and complex decoders. This new coding paradigm is particularly adequate to emerging applications such as wireless video cameras and wireless low-power surveillance networks, disposable video cameras, certain medical applications, sensor networks, multi-view image acquisition, networked camcorders, etc., where low complexity encoders are a must because memory, computational power, and energy are scarce. The objective of DISCOVER is to explore and to propose new video coding schemes and tools in the area of Distributed Video Coding with a strong potential for new applications, targeting new advances in coding efficiency, error resiliency, scalability, and model based-video coding. The TEMICS project-team is coordinating - and contributing to - the workpackage dealing with the development of the theoretical framework and the development of Wyner-Ziv specific tools. In 2007, we have in particular designed optimum prediction filters for the Wyner-Ziv scenario, developed Slepian-Wolf codes based on quasi-arithmetic codes and on channel codes. The TEMICS project-team also contributes to the development of algorithmic tools for the complete coding/decoding architecture and to the integration of the complete video codec. In that context, methods of side information extraction, of rate control and optimal MMSE signal reconstruction in presence of side information have been developed.

• FP7 IST NOE NEWCOM++
  Contributed by: Aline Roumy, Christine Guillemot, Velotiaray Toto-Zarasoa.
  Convention number: 104C045731324005
  Title: NEWCOM: Network of Excellence in Wireless Communication..
  Funding: CEE
  Period: Jan. 2008 - Dec. 2009.
  

  The NEWCOM++ project proposal (Network of Excellence in Wireless COMmunication) intends to create a trans-European virtual research centre on the topic ``The Network of the Future''. It was submitted to Call 1 of the VII Framework Program under the Objective ICT-2007.1.1: The Network of the Future, mainly in its target direction ``Ubiquitous network infrastructure and architectures''. We participate in the workpackage WPR7 - Joint source and channel co-decoding which we now coordinate together with the task TR7.3 Tools for multi-terminal JSCC/D. WPR7 addresses issues related to the robust transmission of multimedia, and essentially video, over wireless channels (possibly terminating a wired IP network). Such issues are : (i) solving the compatibility problem with the classical OSI layers separation (to what extent can we keep this separation ?) (ii) providing new tools (and expanding existing ones) for Joint Source and Channel Coding/decoding (JSCC/D) in classical one to one, one to many (broadcast), or distributed contexts (iii) providing new tools for analysing the efficiency of these tools (iv) working on practical, long term situations, which will be used as test-beds.

Other grants

National Initiatives

• ARC Telegeo
  Contributed by: Ralphaèle Balter, Luce Morin, Stéphane Morin
  Title: Telegeo: Geometry and Telecommunications.
  Partners: Creatis-Insa de Lyon, ENST Paris, INRIA (ISA, TEMICS, PRISME).
  Funding: INRIA
  Period: Jun.02-Jun.04
  

  This ARC (Action de Recherche Coopérative) aims at creating a synergy in the area of geometric objects transmission over networks, and more specifically to study the representation of geometric objects for their transmission over heterogeneous networks. TEMICS contributes by providing compression algorithms for unstructured surface meshes, and techniques for progressive and scalable compression taking into account visual quality criteria.

• ACI Fabriano Contributed by: François Cayre, Teddy Furon
  Title: Fabriano
  Partners: CERDI, INRIA (TEMICS), LIS, LSS.
  Funding: Ministry of research, CNRS, INRIA.
  Period: Dec.03-Dec.06
  

  Fabriano is an ACI (Action Concertée Incitative) dedicated to the study of technical solutions to the problem of security based on watermarking and steganography. In particular, this action aims at developing a theoretical framework for stegano-analysis to be applied for the design of algorithms that will allow to detect the presence of a message within a signal in the respect of rights and ethical issues.

• ACI Nebbiano Contributed by: Teddy Furon
  Title: Nebbiano.
  Partners: Laboratoire de Mathématiques de J.A. Dieudonné - Université de Nice, Laboratoire des Images et des Signaux - INPG Grenoble.
  Funding: ANR
  Period: Jan.07-Dec.09
  

  Nebbiano studies the security and the reliability of watermarking techniques. It is decomposed into 3 axis of research. Two of them stem from the past national project ACI FABRIANO: Investigations of the role of the Independent Component Analysis in data hiding, and the design of new secure and robust watermarking techniques. A third topic has been introduced in the above section: the reliability of watermarking techniques, especially the assessment of extremely low probability of errors.

• ACI Masse de Données Contributed by: Olivier Crave, Christine Guillemot
  Title: Codage de masses de données.
  Partners: ENST-Paris, INRIA (TEMICS), I3S Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis.
  Funding: Ministry of research
  Period: Dec.03-Dec.06
  The objective of this project is to federate research effort in the two following areas: (i)- Motion-compensated spatio-temporal wavelet (MCSTW) scalable coding: Tools for scalability available in existing standards usually lack compression efficiency, and are not flexible enough to achieve combination of different scalability dimensions (e.g. spatial, temporal, SNR, object and complexity scalability) and sufficient fine granularity. MCSTW offers the ideal framework for scalable compression of video sequences. Precise research tasks include scalable motion estimation and coding methods, non-linear adaptive wavelet decompositions, more appropriate for representing temporal residuals, techniques for progressive transmission of information (embedded coding, multiple description coding, ...). (ii)- Distributed source video coding: Traditional predictive coding, exploiting temporal correlations in a sequence through computational-intensive motion estimation between successive frames leads to encoders with a complexity 5 to 10 times higher than the complexity of the decoders. This is well suited to streaming or broadcasting applications, but not to a transmission from a mobile terminal to a base station or for peer-to-peer mobile communications. The project is investigating multi-terminal and distributed source coding solutions building upon dualities with multiple description coding and with channel coding with side information.

Bi-lateral international co-operation

• International collaboration with ISECS, Sfax, Tunisia
  Contributed by: Aline Roumy
  Title: Radio resource optimization in iterative receivers.
  Partners: CNRS-DGRSRT/Tunisian university..
  Funding: CNRS-DGRSRT/Tunisian university.
  Period: Jun.07-Dec.09
  

  This is a collaboration with N.\ Sellami (ISECS, Sfax, Tunisia) and I.\ Fijalkow (ETIS, Cergy France). The goal of the proposed project is the analysis of turbo-like receiver in order to allocate the resources (power, training sequence length...) of the system. The grant supports travel and living expenses of investigators for short visits to partner institutions abroad.