The 21st century will see the formation of a“Cyber society”that, while separate form the real world, will cooperate with it, leading to the further expansion and development of world society. Cyber society allows the formation of virtual space through the connection of multiple computers in a network. In this virtual space, multiple users can communicate with each other and can collect and exchange information while moving about freely and engaging in activities. Three main technologies are vital to the construction of the Cyber society: platform technology for converting multimedia information to optical signals and performing digital processing and communication processing on such signals; communications network technology for transferring these signals from one point to another; and application technology for configuring the Cyber society that will be formed on this network. This paper describes platform technology and network technology with an emphasis on their relationship to application technology for configuring the Cyber society, and will also discuss InterSpace, one of the cyber society platform system of the Cyber society.

In this paper, we propose an error-resilient transmission technique for the H.263 video data stream over wireless networks. The proposed algorithm employs bit rearrangement hierarchically, providing the robust and exact synchronization against the bit errors, without requiring extra redundant information. In addition, we propose the recovery algorithm for the lost or erroneous motion vectors. We implement the encoder and decoder, based on the H.263 standard, and evaluate the proposed algorithm through intensive computer simulation. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm yields good image quality, in spite of the channel errors, and prevents the error propagation both in the spatial and the temporal domain efficiently.

In Japan, digital HDTV services via broadcasting satellite are planned to start in 2000. NHK has developed an HDTV codec conforming to the MPEG-2 $MPHL$ and estimated the coded picture quality with diverse image sequences. This paper shows the codec specifications and presents the result of the picture quality assessment.

The goal of this research is to describe relations between impressions and elements in an image (i.e. color, texture and contours). Adequate image segmentation technique to extract these elements is required. We think that a sketch and a realistic painting are examples of optimal segmented images for our purpose because brush strokes are seem to be segmented areas and realistic paintings should remain the same impression as the model. For the reason, in this paper the segmentation technique which can create realistic painting-like segmentation is exploited. It is shown that the realistic painting-like segmentation is suitable for analyzing images.

In this paper, we propose a hierarchical segmentation method for tracking a semantic video object using a watershed algorithm based on morphological filtering. In the proposed method, each hierarchy consists of three steps: First, markers are extracted on the simplified current frame. Second, region growing by a modified watershed algorithm is performed for segmentation. Finally, the segmented regions are classified into 3 categories, i.e., inside, outside, and uncertain regions according to region probability values, which are acquired by the probability map calculated from a estimated motion field. Then, for the remaining uncertain regions, the above three steps are repeated at lower hierarchies with less simplified frames until every region is decided to a certain region. The proposed algorithm provides prospective results in video sequences such as Miss America, Clair, and Akiyo.

This paper describes an automatic recognition method of contents in moving images. The recognition process is carried out by the following two steps. At first, camera works in moving images are analyzed and moving objects are extracted from the moving images. Next, the motion of the object is recognized by pre-procured knowledge. These techniques will be applied to a construction of an efficient image database.

In this paper, a new method of obtaining specular surface shape by using five degrees of freedom camera system is described. The normal vectors of the surface are extracted by achieving the coincident between the camera axis and the surface normal vector. This method uses a five degrees of freedom (5DOF) camera to fulfill this task. From the normal vector data, the shape of the surface is reconstructed. The result shows that the methodology improves the 3-D shape of object measurement with good accuracy.

Several 3 dimensional image display systems were recently developed in Korea. These are a holographic video system based on pulse laser illumination, ad 8-view 3 dimensional image system capable of displaying computer generated 3 dimensional images and multiview 3 dimensional imaging system based on moving aperture and holographic screens of both transmission and reflection types. All these systems require no special glasses to watch and works impressively.

This paper describes the development of the 3DDAC mk.4 system, which is a brand new implementation on the research program. The 3DDAC is a fatigue-less stereoscopic display system that is provided with a compensating function of accommodation for binocular disparity 3D image representation. The mk.4 system also features a light-weight HMD style.

This paper presents a method of controlling camera to present virtual space to participating users meaningfully. The users interact with each other by means of dialogue and behavior. Users behave through their avatars. So our problem comes down to controlling the camera to capture the avatars effectively depending on how they interact with each other. The problem is solved by specifying camera control rules based on cinematography developed by film producers. A formal language is designed to encode cinematography rules for virtual environments where people can participate in the story and can influence its flow. The rule has been used in a 3D chatting system we have developed.

Recently, a study of Virtual-Reality becomes active. Expectation to 3-D reproduction technology rises with it. Electro-holography using Spatial-light-modulator attracts attention, because natural 3-D animated image is provided. It is important to execute hologram calculation at high speed to realize the real time electro-holography. In other words, a higher-speed computer and a study of calculation algorithm becomes an important subject. This time, we realized to fast calculation of Fresnel-Hologram by networking technology.

The paper aims to present a new human-scale haptic advice for virtual environment named Scaleable-SPIDAR (Space Interface Device for Artificial Reality), which can provides different aspects of force feedback sensations, associated mainly with weight, contact and inertia, to both hands within a cave-like space. Tensioned string techniques are used to generate such haptic sensations, while keeping the space transparent and unbulky. The device is scaleable so as to enclose different cave-like working spaces. Scaleable-SPIDAR is coupled with a large screen where a computer generated virtual world is displayed. The used approach is shown to be simple, safe ad sufficiently accurate for human-scale virtual environment.

Our platform introduced in this paper is based on DAVIC specifications which define high quality multimedia services with some extensions to provide user friendly and uniform interface to its users. We designed and implemented an integrated service platform for high quality interactive multimedia services, swithed digital broadcasting, and Internet services. The integration in terms of a service provider system, a delivery system, and a service user system is taken into account. Our research results in the development of integrated high quality interactive and digital broadcasting multimedia services with web-based common user interface and its experience will be feedback to the field trial service which will be launched from next year.

This paper describes implementation of the core DSM-CC UU interface. It briefly describes the reference model for the DSM-CC and related standards that should be reviewed for the implementation. The Common Object Request Broker Architechture, Revision 2.0 (CORBA 2.0) is sued as a remote procedure call (RPC) scheme for the UU Interface. Entire system was implemented with C++ on Windows NT platforms. The implementation procedure has been decomposed ito two tasks. The first task is to implement the Naming Service for service navigation. The Naming Service is one of the CORBA Services that extend the core CORBA specification. A client GUI is implemented for easy navigation among various services. The second task is to construct multimedia server and client for a Video-on-Demand (VoD) system. MPEG-2 Transport Stream is transported via ATM AAL5 using the Windows Socket 2.2 ATM extension API. A GUI enables the user to navigate the service domain and select a program. After the selection the user can control the MPEG-2 stream with VCR-like buttons.

Many of the newest network suers are gaining their fist network experience as users of the Internet. Because of the universal nature of this exciting new experience, millions of new users are driving the demand for increasingly multimedia oriented applications, especially in communication area. Since the communication via the Internet can use various media forms including audio, video and graphics, it can e very efficient communication system on the Internet, which allows Internet users to communicate, collaborate, and associate with others. Webber provides various communication services, like ACS(Audio Conference System), VCS(Video Conference System) and Virtual Space, in an integrated environment. Webber consists of Service-PUBs(Processing Unit Plug-in), which process each service, and Framework, which manages these PUPs. PUP is so highly independent of each other that it's easy to add, maintain, delete services and also optimally configure the system to user's terminal performance or network status.

For the efficient searching and browsing of digital video, it is essential to extract the internal structure of the video contents. As an example, a news video consists of several sections such as politics, economics, sports and others, and also each section consists of individual topics. With this information in hand, users can ore easily access the required video frames. This paper addresses the problem of automatic shot boundary detection and selection of representative frames (R-frames), which are the essential step in recognizing the internal structure of video contents. In the shot boundary detection, a new algorithm that have dual detectors which are designed specifically for the abrupt boundaries (cuts) and gradually changing bounaries respectively is proposed. Compared to the existing 미algorithms that mostly have tried to detect both types by a single mechanism, the proposed algorithm is proved to be more robust and accurate. Also in the problem of R-frame selection, simple mechanical approaches such as selecting one frame every other second have been adopted. However this approach often selects too many R-frames in static short, while drops important frames in dynamic shots. To improve the selection mechanism, a new R-frame selection algorithm that uses motion information extracted from pixel difference is proposed.

Application sharing is the ability to use existing applications, such as Excel or MS-Word, during a group session without modification. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an application sharing system, called ShareIt, which enable users to share arbitrary MS-Windows applications under the Win 3.1/95/NT and X window system, and evaluation of the system performance. To share an application, the image of the application window is captured and transmitted to other sites. With the use of the window capturing method, ShareIt allows any MS-Windows application to be shared regardless of not only the window systems but also the version-up of window systems.

This paper proposes a method to manage individual information on large scale distributed geographic information systems. On such system, ordinary users usually cannot alter the contents of the server. The method proposed in this paper makes possible to alter the contents or add individual data onto such kinds of non-write-permitted data onto set. We call the method as GDSF, ‘geographic differential script file’. In this method, a client user makes a GDSF which contains the private information to be added onto the served data. Then, the client keeps the file on a local disk. After this, when the user uses the data, he applies the differential data sequence onto the down loaded data to restore the information. The GDSF is a collection of picture commands which tell pictures insertions, deletions, and modification operations. The GDSF also can contain the modification. The GDSF also can contain the modification of the attribute information of geographic entities. The method also applicable to modify data on a ROM device, for example CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. This paper describes the method and experimental results.

The Internet today is teemed with not only text data but also other media such as sound, still and moving images in a variety of formats. Unlike text, however, that can be retrieved easily with the help of numerous search engines, there has been few way to access data of other media unless the exact location or the URL is known. Multimedia data in the WWW are contained in or linked via anchors in the hyper-documents. They can most reliably be retrieved by analyzing the binary data content, which is far from being practical yet by the current state of the art. Instead we present another technique of searching based on textual descriptions which are found at or around the multimedia objects. The textual description used in this research includes file name (URL), anchor text and its context, alternative descriptions found in ALT HTML tage. These are actually the clues assumedly relevant to the contents. Although not without a possibility of missing or misinterpreting images and sounds, the description-based search is highly practical in terms of computation. The prototype search engine will soon be deployed to the public service through the prestige search engine, InfoDetective, in Korea.

As digital audio video data compression and transmission techniques are matured, huge amount of digital multimedia material is produced and delivered via broadcasting, digital storage media and world-wide web(WWW). Thus it became very important to provide a standardized way of multimedia data content description, so that efficient and effective access and reuse of valuable multimedia information can be possible. In this paper, enabling core technologies and our research directions on this are presented with brief introduction on the scope of the multimedia content description interface, called MPEG-7, in terms of objective, application and requirements.

In this paper, we focus on the information retrieval of human individuals who are recorded on the video database. Our purpose is to index persons by their faces or voice and to retrieve their existing time sections on the video data. The database system can track as well as extract a face or voice of a certain person and construct a model of the individual person in self-organization mode. If he appears again at different time, the system can put the mark of the same person to the associated frames. In this way, the same person can be retrieved even if the system does not know his exact name. As the face and speaker modeling, a subspace method is employed to improve the indexing accuracy.

There is considerable research activity related to computer graphics and virtual reality within the National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Hsinchu, Taiwan. In this article, we describe the history of computer graphics at NCTU and report on our current research topics and future works. Besides we also briefly outline the research works on computer graphics and virtual reality within universities in Taiwan.

Currently virtual studio has used the cromakey method in which an image is captured, and the blue portion of that image is replaced by a graphic image or a real image. The replaced image must be changed according to the camera motion. This paper proposes a novel method to extract camera parameters using the recognition of pentagonal patterns which are painted on the blue screen. The corresponding parameters are position, direction and focal length of the camera in the virtual studio. At first, pentagonal patterns are found using invariant features of the pentagon. Then, the projective transformation of two projected images and the camera parameters are calculated using the matched points. Simulation results indicate that camera parameters are more easily calculated compared to the conventional methods.

This paper provides a method for video augmentation using image interpolation. In computer graphics or augmented reality, 3D information of a model object is necessary to generate 2D views of the model, which are then inserted into or overlayed on environmental views or real video frames. However, we do not require any three dimensional model but images of the model object at some locations to render views according to the motion of video camera which is calculated by an SFM algorithm using point matches under weak-perspective (scaled-orthographic) projection model. Thus, a linear view interpolation algorithm is applied rather than a 3D ray-tracing method to get a view of the model at different viewpoints from model views. In order to get novel views in a way that agrees with the camera motion the camera coordinate system is embedded into model coordinate system at initialization time on the basis of 3D information recovered from video images and model views, respectively. During the sequence, motion parameters from video frames are used to compute interpolation parameters, and rendered model views are overlayed on corresponding video frames. Experimental results for real video frames and model views are given. Finally, discussion on the limitations of the method and subjects for future research are provided.

It is difficult and important for virtual studio systems and media-art products to be designed effective interactions between a performance person, who appears in the studio, and virtual studio equipments, and, an appreciation person and artistic products. The difficulties originate with originate with no even-grained component and no framework of interaction design work. In this article, a layered authoring model is proposed in order to facilitate system designers and artists to construct the system more easily and flexibly using fine-grained media components. And some experimental interactive virtual environments based on the model are shown.

This paper presents a new prediction method RBP region-based prediction model where the context used for prediction contains regions instead of individual pixels. There is a meaningful property that RBP can partition a cartoon image into two distinctive types of regions, one containing full-color backgrounds and the other containing boundaries, edges and home-chromatic areas. With the development of computer techniques, synthetic images created with CG (computer graphics) becomes attactive. Like the demand on data compression, it is imperative to efficiently compress synthetic images such as cartoon animation generated with CG for storage of finite capacity and transmission of narrow bandwidth. This paper a lossy compression method to full-color regions and a lossless compression method to homo-chromatic and boundaries regions. Two criteria for partitioning are described, constant criterion and variable criterion. The latter criterion, in form of a linear function, gives the different threshold for classification in terms of contents of the image of interest. We carry out experiments by applying our method to a sequence of cartoon animation. We carry out experiments by applying our method to a sequence of cartoon animation. Compared with the available image compression standard MPEG-1, our method gives the superior results in both compression ratio and complexity.

This paper resents a spatio-temporal video segmentation method. The algorithm segments each frame of video sequences captured by a static or moving camera into moving objects (foreground) and background using a statistical hypothesis test. In the proposed method, three consecutive image frames are exploited and a hypothesis testing is performed by comparing two means from two consecutive difference images, which results in a T-test. This hypothesis test yields change detection mask that indicates moving areas (foreground) and non-moving areas (background). Moreover, an effective method for extracting object mask form change detection mask is proposed.

In this paper, we propose a lossless motion video coding method using motion compensation. For realtime coding and transmission, we developed a lossless video codec based on the proposed method. It was confirmed the codec functions normally in an experiment involving coding and transmitting through an actual ATM network. Furthermore, we proposed a lossless coding method with bit-plane expansion under a constant bitrate. Two approaches, a closed bit-plane approach and a merged bit-plane approach, are considered and characteristics of their compression efficiency are estimated. Simulation results show that the proposed method is suitable for lossless video coding with bitrate control.

This paper describes the concept of object-based coding for future broadcasting environments. Digital broadcasting uses the MPEG2 coding scheme which is regarded as a picture-based coding. An object-based coding scheme is a potential candidate for future broadcasting both for studio and distribution uses, and it offers a higher compression more flexible content handling. This paper also describes key technologies that we have been developing for the object-based coding, e.g., image analysis, object extraction and coding of objects.

We introduce a new zerotree scheme that effectively exploits the inter-scale self-similarities found in the octave decomposition by a wavelet transform. A zerotree is useful to efficiently code wavelet coefficients and its efficiency was proved by Shapiro's EZW. In the coding scheme, wavelet coefficients are symbolized and entropy-coded for more compression. The entropy per symbol is determined from the produced symbols and the final coded size is calculated by multiplying the entropy and the total number of symbols. In this paper, were analyze produced symbols from the EZW and discuss the entropy per symbol. Since the entropy depends on the produced symbols, we modify the procedure of symbolic streaming out for the purpose. First, we extend the relation between a parent and children used in the EZW to raise a probability that a significant parent has significant children. The proposed relation is flexibly extended according to the fact that a significant coefficient is highly addressed to have significant coefficients in its neighborhood. The extension way is reasonable because an image is decomposed by convolutions with a wavelet filter and thus neighboring coefficients are not independent with each other.

This paper describes Facial Expression Explorer to search for the components of a facial expression and to map the expression to other expressionless figures like a robot, frog, teapot, rabbit and others. In general, it is a time-consuming and laborious job to create a facial expression manually, especially when the facial expression must personify a well-known public figure or an actor. In order to extract a blending ratio from facial images automatically, the Facial Expression Explorer uses Networked Genetic Algorithm(NGA) which is a fast method for the convergence by GA. The blending ratio is often used to create facial expressions through shape blending methods by animators. With the Facial Expression Explorer a realistic facial expression can be modeled more efficiently.

Old movies are often corrupted by randomly located blotches and scratches. In this paper were present an efficient method for detection and removal of these distortions. The presented method is composed of two separate steps: the detection process and the restoration process. In the detection process, blotch locations are detected through global motion segmentation, the sequential approach to motion segmentation, a robust model-fit criterion and so on, we form the algorithm for the algorithm for the global motion segmentation tuned to the blotch detection problem. In the restoration process, the missing data of the detected blotch areas are temporally extrapolated from the corresponding image areas at the preceding or the succeeding image frame with considering the global motion segmentation results. We apply the presented method to moving image sequences distorted by artificial blotches. The method works very well and provides a subjective improvement of picture quality.