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Presenter: Dr. Ishfaq Ahmad - Dept. of Computer Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Supervisor:

Date: Wed, February 28, 2001
Time: 14:30:00 - 15:30:00
Place: EOW 430

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT:

MPEG-4 is the new standard for interactive multimedia based information systems. MPEG-4 aims to support content-based coding, communication, access, and manipulation of digital video, audio, graphics, animation, images, and text objects. Compared to the conventional frame-based compression techniques, the object-based representation and coding enable MPEG-4 to cover a broad range of emerging applications, real-time, non-real-time, interactive, and non-interactive. In this talk, we present an overview of our current research in building multimedia systems based on this standard. Harnessing the power of MPEG-4 requires highly efficient compression and decompression schemes that should provide very high compression ratio at real-time speed. MPEG-4 video encoder and decoder are very complex and need considerable research even after the standard is defined. They also require more computing power than the previous video coding standards.

We touch upon several key algorithmic and system issues that are challenging both from research and implementation points of views. We explain our algorithms and optimization techniques that enable the software based MPEG-4 codec to achieve the conflicting goals of yielding a high compression ratio and preserving good visual quality, at a real-time speed on a single PC.

We will also mention and demonstrate some of the applications that we are building based on the above technology.

BIOGRAPHY:

Ishfaq Ahmad received a B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, in 1985. He received his M.S. degree in computer engineering and Ph.D degree in computer science, both from Syracuse University in 1987 and 1992, respectively. He is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

Prof. Ahmad's research interests span the areas of high-performance computing, parallel and distributed systems, video compression, and networked multimedia information technologies. At HKUST, he also directs the Multimedia Technology Research Center, which he founded. The center is supported through research grants from the government funding agencies as well as several Hong Kong and US companies. Comprising a group of more than 40 personnel, the center focuses on research and applications of interactive multimedia systems and video compression. A number of technologies developed at the research center are now being commercially used by various high-tech companies in Hong Kong and the Silicon Valley. The center is collaborating with some 50 industrial partners and research laboratories around the world.

Prof. Ahmad has published over 100 technical papers in refereed journals and conferences. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journals of Parallel and Distributed Computing, IEEE Concurrency, Cluster Computing, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, and the new IEEE Distributed Systems Online where he is responsible for Distributed Multimedia. He is a member of the IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Communication Society.

For Further Information Contact: Dr. N.J. Dimopoulos (721-8902)