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Thin, flat-panel direct-view video displays offer the prospect of larger picture size and lower weight and volume, but they will be accepted only if they can compete with the excellent performance and low price of today's shadow-mask CRT. A new and important underpinning in panel development is the growing maturity of IC technology. If such new panels are successfully developed, they could find application in any size from compact portable to extra-large. Large panels will probably be the first to become e-conomically feasible.

A correct balance of nutrient intake is very important, particularly in infants. When the body is deprived of essential nutrients, it can lead to serious disease and organ deterioration which can cause serious health issues in adulthood. Automated monitoring of the nutritional content of food provided to infants, not only at home but also in daycare facilities, is essential for their healthy development. To address this challenge, this paper presents a new Internet of Things (IoT)-based fully automated nutrition monitoring system, called Smart-Log, to advance the state-of-art in smart healthcare. For the realization of Smart-Log, a novel 5-layer perceptron neural network and a Bayesian network-based accurate meal prediction algorithm are presented in this paper. Smart-Log is prototyped as a consumer electronics product which consists of WiFi enabled sensors for food nutrition quantification, and a smart phone application that collects nutritional facts of the food ingredients. The Smart-Log prototype uses an open IoT platform for data analytics and storage. Experimental results consisting of 8172 food items for 1000 meals show that the prediction accuracy of Smart-Log is 98.6%.

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to increasing data volumes, which are expected to grow exponentially. The IoT has great potential to positively change society but also presents challenges regarding privacy. In practice, Smart community public housing projects involving tens of thousands of households have recently been implemented. This study proposed a privacy-preserving smart home system, which connects a single home controller with data-hiding capabilities through community networking and integrates the data to a hierarchical architecture on a cloud platform for a data analytical access control mechanism. In addition, this paper outlines a variety of smart home data applications through data collected from a smart community environment with the developed privacy protection mechanism. The monitoring and protecting mechanism combines privacy-enhancing technologies with a privacy-preserving strategy from the initial system-designing stage through to full data lifecycle management. The types of smart home data that can be obtained from a community hierarchy, such as identification values, sensitive data, and non-sensitive data, were collected and classified. Through a combination of empirical application and sophisticated exploration of theoretical knowledge, this paper substantially contributes to the home automation field. The proposed system architecture is expected to enable both easy understanding for users and compliance for analytical service providers regarding the operation, procedure, limitation, and benefits of smart home data analysis, thereby providing a solution that ensures both privacy and data availability.

Authentication protocol plays an important role in the short-range wireless communications for the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. Due to the shared nature of wireless communication networks, there are several kinds of security vulnerabilities. Recently, a pseudonym-based NFC protocol (PBNFCP) has been proposed to withstand the security pitfalls found in the existing conditional privacy preserving security protocol (CPPNFC). However, this paper further analyzes PBNFCP and shows that it still fails to prevent the claimed security properties, such as impersonation attacks against an adversary, who is a malicious registered user having a valid pseudonym and corresponding private key. In order to overcome these security drawbacks, this paper proposes a secure and efficient authentication protocol (SEAP) for NFC applications using lifetime-based pseudonyms. The proposed SEAP is simulated for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool. The simulation results show that SEAP is secure. The rigorous security and performance analysis shows that the proposed SEAP is secure and efficient as compared to the related existing authentication protocols for NFC applications.

Today, an ever-increasing number of devices has networking capability. The main implication of this fact is that such devices are often left fully powered yet idle just to maintain their network presence, hence leading to large energy waste. This ultimately results in higher electricity cost for consumers. This paper tackles an effective mechanism to reduce energy waste of consumer electronics, by boosting the usage of lowpower states available in most devices. The main concept is to delegate background networking routines to home gateways, which are today available in most homes and offices. The paper describes the functionality and the software architecture to be implemented by home gateways and consumer electronics, reports performance evaluation on a working prototype, and provides estimation of potential benefits for consumers.

Recent consumer devices such as smartphones, smart TVs and tablet PCs adopt NAND flash memory as storage device due to its advantages of small size, reliability, low power consumption, and high performance. The unique characteristics of NAND flash memory require an additional software layer, called flash translation layer (FTL), between traditional file systems and flash memory. In order to reduce the garbage collection cost, FTLs generally try to separate hot and cold data. Previous hot and cold separation techniques monitor the storage access patterns within storage device, or exploit file system hints from host system. This paper proposes a novel clustered page-level mapping, called CPM, which can separate hot and cold data efficiently by allocating different flash memory block groups to different logical address regions. CPM can reduce the FTL map loading overhead during garbage collection and it does not require any high-cost monitoring overhead or host hint. This paper also proposes a K-associative version of CPM, called K-CPM, which allows different logical address regions to share a physical block group in order to achieve high block utilizations. Experimental results show that CPM improves the storage I/O performance by about 54% compared with a previous page-level mapping FTL, and K-CPM further improves the performance by about 19.4% compared with CPM1.

This paper provides a concrete implementation and comprehensive assessment of the energy-based fair queuing (EFQ) scheduling algorithm based on the Linux operating system. EFQ is an extended application of the classical fair queuing algorithm in the energy domain. It is designed to provide proportional power sharing as well as effective time-constraint compliance in energy-centric power management (PM) schemes, a type of operating system-level PM schemes that are targeted at providing a battery lifetime guarantee for energy-limited mobile systems. In this paper work, the structure of the Linux completely fair scheduler (CFS) has been effectively utilized to ease the EFQ implementation and reduce the scheduling overhead. Around 150 lines of code have been added to the Linux kernel V3.3 to achieve the EFQ-related functions and to implement the system calls that are required by the Linux user space. To assess the properties of the EFQ scheduler, a test-bench based on the POSIX threads has been developed and the benchmarks of an open-source embedded suite are referred to program the threads under test. The EFQ algorithm is assessed from two aspects, energy management and real-time scheduling. Experimental results on energy management show that EFQ is more effective than the CFS scheduler in managing energy and it can achieve a proportional share of the system power regardless of on which device the energy is spent. Experimental results on real-time scheduling demonstrate that EFQ can achieve strict time-constraint compliance and a robust response time upon the increase of energy estimation error and active tasks.

Emerging storage class RAM (SCRAM) devices are power-efficient, byte-addressable, and non-volatile. However, each SCRAM memory cell has a limited lifetime. To use SCRAM to replace power-hungry DRAM in mobile consumer devices, wear-leveling among cells will be a critical issue. Especially, due to the locality of memory access pattern, current operating systems. SCRAM-unaware memory allocator may intensify the wear of certain SCRAM blocks. Wear-leveling requires the redesign of operating systems to distribute memory accesses evenly throughout the entire memory space. This paper suggests two operating-system-level wear-leveling techniques for SCRAM devices. First, this paper proposes a novel memory allocator, called W-Buddy, that considers the wear of memory chunks as it selects a free memory chunk to be allocated. Second, this paper proposes a variable metadata formatting technique for file systems. The experiment results show that the proposed W-Buddy allocator and metadata reformatting technique improve the lifetime of SCRAM devices compared with the techniques of conventional operating systems.

As multi-tasking has become the common feature of modern smart devices, providing QoS (quality of service) guarantees for heterogeneous applications becomes challenging. For example, if a real-time application like a movie player is executed simultaneously with other applications, jitters may be experienced due to resource contention among the concurrent processes. This paper presents a novel I/O mechanism to provide jitter-free multimedia playing in smart devices. To this end, the I/O paths of smart devices were explored and two sources of unpredictable latency were discovered. The first one is the garbage collection overhead of flash memory and the second one is the non-preemptive scheduling used in the software platform of smart devices. This paper resolves these problems by adopting non-volatile memory as the storage of real-time applications, and then performing non-blocking I/O for them. This mechanism completely prevents all possible run-time delays due to the interferences of other processes, providing QoS-guaranteed services for real-time applications. Tracedriven simulations show that the proposed scheme reduces the deadline miss ratio of a movie player by 40% on average.

Recommending TV content to groups of viewers is best carried out when relevant information such as the demographics of the group is available. However, it can be difficult and time consuming to extract information for every user in the group. This paper shows how an audio analysis of the age and gender of a group of users watching the TV can be used for recommending a sequence of N short TV content items for the group. First, a state of the art audio-based classifier determines the age and gender of each user in an M-user group and creates a group profile. A genetic recommender algorithm then selects for each user in the profile, a single personalized multimedia item for viewing. When the number of items to be presented is different to the number of viewers in the group, i.e. M ≠ N, a novel adaptation algorithm is proposed that first converts the M-user group profile to an N-slot content profile, thus ensuring that items are proportionally allocated to users with respect to their demographic categorization. The proposed system is compared to an ideal system where the group demographics are provided explicitly. Results using real speaker utterances show that, in spite of the inaccuracies of state-of-the-art age-and-gender detection systems, the proposed system has a significant ability to predict an item with a matching age and gender category. User studies were conducted where subjects were asked to rate a sequence of advertisements, where half of the advertisements were randomly selected, and the other half were selected using the audio-derived demographics. The recommended advertisements received a significant higher median rating of 7.75, as opposed to 4.25 for the randomly selected advertisements 1. Recommending TV content to groups of viewers is best carried out when relevant information such as the demographics of the group is available. However, it can be difficult and time consuming to extract information for every user in the group. This paper shows how an audio analysis of the age and gender of a group of users watching the TV can be used for recommending a sequence of N short TV content items for the group. First, a state of the art audio-based classifier determines the age and gender of each user in an M-user group and creates a group profile. A genetic recommender algorithm then selects for each user in the profile, a single personalized multimedia item for viewing. When the number of items to be presented is different to the number of viewers in the group, i.e. M ≠ N, a novel adaptation algorithm is proposed that first converts the M-user group profile to an N-slot content profile, thus ensuring that items are proportionally allocated to users with respect to their demographic categorization. The proposed system is compared to an ideal system where the group demographics are provided explicitly. Results using real speaker utterances show that, in spite of the inaccuracies of state-of-the-art age-and-gender detection systems, the proposed system has a significant ability to predict an item with a matching age and gender category. User studies were conducted where subjects were asked to rate a sequence of advertisements, where half of the advertisements were randomly selected, and the other half were selected using the audio-derived demographics. The recommended advertisements received a significant higher median rating of 7.75, as opposed to 4.25 for the randomly selected advertisements 1.

High functionality and interactivity of video services are strongly desired. Earlier reports have presented an encoding scheme and a fast joining scheme for interactive multivision video streaming systems. Together, they enable numerous users to access any view area interactively at any desired resolution. The joining means the combination of multiple streams into a single video stream. The server joins pre-encoded multiple streams into one bitstream according to a user request; then the server transmits it simultaneously to many clients. This structure obviates complexity at the client terminal because the client terminal simply receives and decodes the single stream. This paper describes implementation of an actual HTTP-based streaming server by embedding the stream joiner module into a widely available HTTP server. The contribution of this paper is that the joining speed of the server surpasses the necessary speed attained with practical network equipment connecting to the server. Results of experiments described in this paper underscore the proposed method's effectiveness.

The work in this paper concerns the determination of a recognition unit in a small footprint Chinese large vocabulary word recognition system for embedded devices. This paper proposes a method of extending the conventional initial/final phonetic units in Chinese language to be used as a recognition unit. The word recognition performance of the proposed extended initial/final is compared with that of other recognition units, such as syllable, phoneme, triphone and the original initial/final. Under a similar memory usage limitation, the word recognition rates of different recognition units are evaluated. The proposed extended initial/final shows the best performance in a fixed memory usage condition: 93.74%, 94.76%, and 95.42% accuracy for 50K-word recognizer under memory restriction around 500KB, 1MB, and 5MB, respectively.

High functionality and interactivity of video services are strongly desired. This paper presents a proposal of an encoding scheme and a fast joining scheme for interactive multi-vision systems. The scheme enables numerous users to access any view area interactively with any desired resolution. The joining means the combination of multiple streams into a single video stream. The server joins pre-encoded multiple streams into one bitstream according to a user request, and then transmits it simultaneously to many clients. This structure obviates complexity at the client terminal because the client terminal simply receives and decodes the single stream. However, if joining processing loads are high, then it is difficult to provide services to many users. This paper presents a proposal of a new encoding method with prediction restrictions, MB-line size insertion, and Macro Block (MB) line byte alignment for a fast and lightweight stream joiner. Results of experiments described in this paper underscore the proposed method's effectiveness.

This paper presents the implementation process for an API that integrates interactive digital TV (iDTV) applications and home network (HN) services, mainly concerning issues of the Brazilian iDTV model. The research in this field is important because it represents current trends on the use of iDTV opening many business opportunities. With the convergence of service providers, modern communication technologies and consumer electronics devices at home, new iDTV applications have emerged, particularly those that use the set-top-boxes (or digital TV sets) processing power to provide additional services, which extends the possibilities of interaction between the user and the connected home. To implement this platform, a known model, which considers aspects of the Ginga middleware and the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) framework, was used. The idea behind the API model is to export service objects from one side to another, allowing the development of two types of applications: the first one on the Ginga-J machine and the last one on the Ginga-NCL machine. The main goals of this paper are (i) presenting the use of free tolls to perform such integration and (ii) showing the most relevant aspects in the core of the two models. Finally, a basic step-by-step process is shown in order to build integrated iDTVHN real applications using this platform.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been becoming increasingly essential in recent years because of their ability to manage real-time situational information for various novel services. Recently, the scope of WSN technologies has been expanded to places such as the home, in order to provide the residents with various intelligent services, such as home automation services or home energy management services. However, due to their architectural constraints, such as the trade-off between the performance and cost, WSNs are not effectively implemented in home environments. Therefore, this paper proposes a ZigBee-based intelligent self-adjusting sensor (ZiSAS) in order to address these concerns. This paper presents a situation-based selfadjusting scheme, an event-based self-adjusting sensor network, and hardware and middleware implementation. We also introduce some smart home services using the proposed system. We implemented our system in real test bed and conducted an experiment. Our experiment shows that we reduce the system's energy consumption.

With the spread of high-definition video devices, and with the advance of digital broadcasting systems and video portal services in the Internet domains, numerous high-definition video presentations become available in everyday life. Under these circumstances, the desire of people to enjoy video contents in new ways had grown. This paper proposes a new multivision video provisioning system that enables numerous users to access any view area with any desired resolution interactively. The basic idea is that the partial area (tile)-based pre-coded video streams are stored in advance. These multiple streams are joined dynamically and delivered based on the user's view-area position. In this paper, the details of H.264/AVC tile-based video coding and a fast tile stream joiner scheme are presented. Simulation experiments and our practical implementation demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal.

As the era of the ubiquitous computing is ushered in, consumers have been primed for a variety of automation applications. Active RFIDs can be used for a number of automation applications because it may also have other sensors to extend its applications. An active RFID instinctively focuses on a long communication range. Nevertheless, active RFIDs cannot be applied to a large-scale area due to their limited radio communication and obstacles. This paper introduces a large-scale active RFID system based on multi-hop deployment utilizing dual radio frequency to overcome radio shadow areas that do not reach signals from the RFID reader. The proposed system consists of multiple RFID readers deployed in an ad hoc pattern. It uses a multihop collection scheme utilizing ZigBee networks to extend the coverage of the RFID reader and collect RFID tags outside its communication range. This paper also includes an experiment evaluating performance of the proposed method, using an implemented RFID system that complies with the standard for 433 MHz active RFIDs based on ISO/IEC 18000-7.

Interactive Digital Television applications bring new value-added functionalities to viewers. In order to fight the current information overload, many of these applications offer personalization capabilities, by matching each viewer's preferences against the available resources. This paper describes TripFromTV+, an interactive application that provides cut-price tailor-made tourist packages by helping the viewer to decide what to do and what to visit during a trip. Different from the existing approaches, this application automatically infers the viewer's preferences from the kind of TV programs he/she enjoyed and from his/her activity in social networking sites, whose diffusion mechanisms are exploited to make the existing tourism offers known among the viewer's contacts. The paper shows how interactive TV applications can incorporate content from the Internet, by creating seamlessly integrated presentations that allow the viewer to have the advantages of the network capabilities in the TV environment through domestic and mobile consumer devices.

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm in reversible data hiding, with the application associated with the quick response (QR) codes. QR codes are random patterns, which can be commonly observed on the corner of posters or webpages. The goal of QR codes aims at convenienceoriented applications for mobile phone users. People can use the mobile phone cameras to capture QR code at the corner of web page, and then the hyperlink corresponding to the QR code can be accessed instantly. Since QR code looks like random noise and it occupies a corner of the original image, its existence can greatly reduce the value of the original content. Thus, how to retain the value of original image, while keeping the capability for the instant access for webpages, would be the major concern of this paper. With the aid of our reversible data hiding technique, the QR codes can be hidden into the original image, and considerable increase in embedding capacity can be expected. Next, we propose a scheme such that when the image containing the QR code is browsed, the hyperlink corresponding to the QR code is accessed first. Then, the QR code could get vanished and the original image would be recovered to retain the information conveyed therein. Simulation results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed algorithm.

Wireless sensor networks have become an essential part of home and building automation, especially for energy management and health monitoring. This paper presents a Distributed Operating System (DOS) based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to manage all embedded devices in a home network at high level of interoperability. This system can solve many problems related to accessing home network from Internet and future networks like Smart Grids. The proposed system takes into consideration the limited resources of sensors as well as the matters of simultaneous multi-access, eventing, authorization, security and scheduling the on-line time of sensors in order to reduce power consumption. The paper shows the advantages of using some features of our SOA distributed operating system, like using a queue with a dispatcher to dispatch the simultaneous web requests and also using cache and scheduling, in addition to using a requester to enable accessing embedded devices with different networking protocols. These features help in increasing the quality of services and reaching high level of reliability.

Literature has shown that the remote control, the main artifact for interaction with the television system, is not adequate to mediate the interaction with Interactive Digital Television (iDTV). This work presents and discusses a new proposal of artifact for interaction with iDTV applications. The paper presents in details the product design and the interaction language for the new digital artifact which presupposes its use by everyone, in the widest possible extension. Additionally, we show the prototype of these new hardware devices and an evaluation with prospective end users of the solution described in this paper.

In this paper, a Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (T-DMB) system for a multichannel audio service is proposed. The multichannel audio information on the T-DMB system proposed in this paper consists of a stereo audio signal coded by BSAC and additional multichannel side information coded by MPEG surround. These two types of information are conveyed through two elementary streams (ES), respectively. To control two elementary streams, two object descriptor (OD) streams are exploited, each of which transmits OD commands, including ObjectDescriptorUpdate and ES_DescriptorUpdate, related to a stereo audio signal and additional multichannel side information, respectively. With this method, the proposed system can convey multichannel side information while guaranteeing backward compatibility for the legacy T-DMB terminals, and moreover makes it possible to provide various advanced service scenarios with outstanding extensibility.

This paper presents an SD-based universal sensor data entry card, named uSD. The prefix "u" of uSD illustrates its most significant characteristic: universality, which means uSD is platform independent and compatible with heterogeneous platforms, truly plug-and-play. In this paper, we relate the design and implementation of uSD, especially about uSD's superiority over SDIO-based method. Additionally, SDK and programmer are provided for thirdparty to design further applications with uSD. Evaluations about performances of uSD are also developed, like power assumption, CPU and RAM usage. Our practical works including two demos well validate uSD's feasibility and its platform independence. uSD not only can help consumers with portable devices to access WSN conveniently and efficiently, but also are appropriate for researchers constructing testbed.

The national standard of digital cable broadcasting in Korea as well as in North America has its root from the OpenCable and OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP). However, OCAP may have interoperability problems when an OpenCable-certified host is moved to a different service area where extended Application Programming Interfaces (API) not defined in the standard are used or code version management is not properly done between System Operators (SOs). Such abnormal cases can be easily found in practical business environments such as in merge and acquisition of SOs. Hosts used in two different SOs may use two incompatible OCAPs. In this paper, a new method is proposed to allow hosts to navigate in different SOs by modifying the Code Version Table (CVT) defined in the Common Download (CD) specification in OpenCable. Also, in this paper, actual validation of the idea using the modified CVT is included through several field tests.

This paper introduces a design of the optimized in-home multi-session streaming server and presents a performance evaluation of high throughput multi-session streaming service with Ethernet and IEEE1394. The in-home streaming server is a kind of personal home server or residential gateway, however it is specialized for in-home multi-session streaming and distribution of multimedia contents. In order to realize this server, two specific features should be in harmony with each other: the multi-stream transcoder to support various presentation constraints of the multimedia client devices and the multi-session streaming interface to transfer multiple high-throughput streams concurrently. In particular, the network interface should absorb the throughput tolerance caused by the concurrent stream-converting processes to maximize the multi-streaming capability of the server with a limited transcoder performance. Hence, this paper evaluates the streaming performance of the two major network protocols, gigabit Ethernet and IEEE1394a, in order to understand their adequateness for the in-home multi-session streaming service.

This paper mainly deals with the statistical processing methods in wireless filed strength prediction process after sampling data are collected. The conventional standard for data collection and statistical processing in the prediction of wireless filed strength is Lee's criteria. It utilizes linear averaging to process sampling data, as many other related papers discussed. However, the accuracy of such first order moment estimation is low, especially under serious Rayleigh fading channels. As regards to the defects of the method, we propose four novel statistical processing methods to process the collected data for wireless field strength. Computer simulations and corresponding analysis verify its much better prediction results with small estimation variances.

In the ubiquitous era of streaming multimedia over the Internet, an increasing number of users are accessing to Internet video services through varieties of terminals, e.g PC, Set-Top Box IPTV and mobile phones, etc. Whereas extending streaming media to multiple ends adds much to consumer electronic industry, the challenge remains on how to provide on-demand services to heterogeneous users with different bandwidth requirement, access manner, QoS demand, etc. The success of a large-scale video streaming system relies heavily on how they address the critical issues in QoS, scalability and heterogeneity, yet no single system has delivered the expected scale and quality for commercial applications. Thus this paper provides a complete portfolio of solutions for providing multiple Internet video streaming services (live video broadcast, video on demand, video downloading) on 3 Screens (PC, TV, mobile), through a unified Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video platform. Upon manageable P2P framework, different terminals access are supported and end user bandwidth are utilized to scale the system. With our multi-process server management, efficient topology organization, enhanced UDP transmission and intelligent content distribution, our P2P streaming media platform is proved to have lower operation cost and higher user quality. The significance of such paper lies not only in the proposed system framework and on-field engineering techniques to enable an enterprise-grade and telecom-class application, but also the industrial insights inside designing such commercialized large-scale platform with full consideration of function, process, configuration and cost1.

This paper proposes a Wyner-Ziv/H.264 transcoder that enables low cost video applications. The proposed solution supports video encoding on resource constrained devices such as disposable video cameras, network camcorders and low cost video encoders. This approach is based on reducing encoding resource requirements on a device by using Wyner-Ziv video encoding. The system shifts the burden of complexity away from the encoder, for example to a network node, where a transcoder efficiently converts WZ encoded video to H.264 by reusing the information from the WZ decoding stage. The transcoded H.264 video is requires fewer resources than WZ decoding and therefore reduces the complexity of decoding. The complexity of encoding and playback ends of video applications is thus reduced enabling new class of consumer application. The paper is focused on reducing the complexity of the macro-block mode coding decision process carried out in H.264 encoding stage of the transcoder. Based on a data mining process, the approach replaces the high complexity H.264 mode decision algorithm by a faster decision tree. The proposed architecture reduces the battery consumption of the end-user devices and the transcoding time is reduced by 86% with negligible rate-distortion loss.

This paper deals with a real-time image based relighting system for tangible video teleconference. The proposed image based relighting system renders the extracted human object using the virtual environmental images. The proposed system can homogenize virtually the lighting environments of remote users on the video teleconference, or render the humans like they are in the virtual places. To realize the video teleconference, the paper obtains the reflectance models of users in real-time using the controlled lighting system. The reflectance models of human surface are obtained by a pair of lighting sources which are turned on and off alternatively. The images with different illuminations are exploited to model the reflectance on the object surfaces. The environment map for rendering is acquired by the mirror ball images or virtual background ones. And the relighting algorithm is implemented by GPU based programming for real-time operation. According to the simulations, the proposed system estimates the reflectance models of human faces, and relights the human faces in real-time. The objects are rendered by the reflectance models and virtual environment map. The proposed system enables the users to immerse video teleconference just as they are in the virtual environments.

This paper describes energy management architecture for multimedia applications in battery powered devices to dynamically control the energy consumption of the device with an effort to increase the battery life. The architecture is divided into two parts, a notification manager and a controller. The notification manager is a generic block and is implemented as part of the system software. It consists of a module that continuously monitors the battery state and sends out notifications. The controller is application specific. The notification manager issues notifications to the multimedia applications to operate under different energy modes based on an energy management algorithm proposed in the paper. The paper describes the implementation of the architecture for multimedia applications as they are the most energy consuming components in a handheld device. Experimental results provided at the end of the paper show the effectiveness of the described architecture. The notification manager also incorporates prediction and sensory modules to utilize the real world scenarios and achieve maximum energy saving.

With the booming of Internet and consumer electronics industry, there are rising amount of content (audio, video, software) that needs to be distributed to increasing number of end consumers in higher speed. Whereas the explosive growth of data-concentrated applications over Internet contributes to the entertainment electronics, the large-scale distribution of huge data to end consumers with guarantee of Quality of Service (QoS), remains an elusive goal. The potential integration of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) paradigm into the Internet content distribution infrastructure provides a disruptive market opportunity to scale the Internet for higher quality data delivery. While the theoretical benefits of P2P in regular Internet has been widely reported, it remains unknown on its performance for large-scale mass data delivery over high-speed networks, highly promising yet controversial. This paper thus provides an experimental and analytical performance study over BitTorrent-like P2P networks for accelerating large-scale content distribution over booming Internet. Our study explores the unique strength of P2P in high speed networks, identifies performance bottlenecks, and quantifies the special requirements in the new scenario, i.e. file piece length and seed capacity. Further, to enable services before full downloading, this paper proposes a Piece-On-Demand (POD) scheme to modify BitTorrent in integration with Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) to both decrease file distribution time and increase service availability. To demonstrate the feasibility of adopting P2P as a reliable consumer network for content distribution, we further illustrate our industrial exploration on utilizing P2P in deployment for application/services with huge image, providing unprecedented deployment speed and scalability for enabling on-demand services to large-scale users.

In this paper we introduce and evaluate a novel machine learning based approach to reduce the complexity of Intra macroblock (MB) coding. The proposed approach is based on the hypothesis that MB coding mode decisions in H.264/AVC video have a correlation with the intensities of adjacent MBs and sub-MBs. This paper also discusses and analyzes different approaches of using machine learning in Intra prediction. We discuss, amongst other features, slices, Intra prediction scheme for H.264 and data mining. We use data mining algorithms to develop decision trees for H.264 coding mode decisions. The proposed approach reduces the H.264/AVC MB mode computation process into a decision tree lookup with very low complexity. The proposed algorithm is implemented in reference software by modifying the source code and is compared with the JM reference software for H.264/AVC.

In this paper, we present the interactive data broadcasting service in T-DMB using middleware technology, which is known as T-DMB MATE (Mobile Application Terminal Environment). The T-DMB MATE defines a number of API to provide various applications with high-level functionalities for interactive data service, supporting a running environment of the applications. Specially, this paper introduces an implementation of T-DMB MATE receiver and some kinds of applications based on the designed T-DMB MATE service. Finally, the effectiveness of proposed service was verified by implementing the receiver and a variety of applications.

This paper addresses building remote control of a home server based on a management markup language (MML). In this paper, we design XML-based MML as a communication language between managing and managed entities and implement a management server and a management agent for home server control in Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) infrastructure. The remote controllable entities include a bundle's life cycle, service's configuration, bundle permission, a start level of bundle, user management, user interface, log, and so on. The main feature of this implementation allows any 3rd parties to provide their management agent with OSG based home server and interoperate with other parties' solution by means of MML.

In this paper we propose a fast and efficient image retrieval method for searching JPEG2000 compressed image databases. Comparing image contents of the JPEG2000 coded images in the pixel domain requires image decompression, which imposes intensive computational processes of the inverse discrete wavelet transform and the arithmetic decoding. On the other hand, the first decoding stage of the JPEG2000 standard is the packet header decoding, which is a simple process, but it provides valuable information about the code blocks in the packet. In this paper we exploit packet header information including the number of non-zero bit-planes, the number of coding passes and the code block length for comparing the JPEG2000 compressed images. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides a better performance compared to other JPEG2000 compressed domain retrieval techniques and even outperforms the pixel-based image retrieval techniques such as the Gabor filter; moreover the proposed method is very fast with very low computational load.

In this paper, the business model and digital rights management (DRM) solution are proposed for the home TV based on scalable video coding and convergent networks. In this environment, the TV program is broadcasted via digital video broadcasting for handheld terminals (DVB-H) to mobile phones, the access right is transmitted by Global System for Mobile communication (GSM/GPRS) channel, and the TV program can also be transmitted from mobile phones to home TV through WiFi. The typical application scenario is that the TV program with low quality (base layer) in the mobile phone can be enriched by enhancement information and shown on home TV. The business model is presented to pay for the enhancement information, and the DRM solution is proposed for solving the copyright issues in the convergence between the DVB-H broadcasting, GSM/GPRS and home network. Since few work has been done to solve this problem, the work proposed in this paper is expected to attract more researchers.

For real-time video encoder, low-complexity video encoding algorithms are required in many applications. This paper provides an early termination scheme to make the conventional binary block motion estimation algorithm significantly faster. The difference between the intensity of original frame and its filtered version is used as an input to something in this paper. With video codec, the proposed scheme shows improved visual quality while reducing complexity. Experimental results are provided to compare the performance of the proposed scheme with the conventional algorithms.

The aim of this paper is to present an approach to the personalization of a Digital Radio (DAB) set. An implemented prototype will be introduced that is adaptively tuning in to the hearing habits of an user, displaying recommendations, autonomously storing contributions and determining contextual information for a programme. The paper focusses on the specification of user preferences and the monitoring of usage behaviours.

In this paper, we propose an intelligent TV interface using a voice-enable dialogue system. This paper rests on the both directions: a new type of dialogue management model and its use for practical systems to commercialize. We devise a practical dialogue management model based on statistical learning methods. To analyze discourse context, we utilize statistical learning techniques for anaphora resolution and discourse history management. Contrary to the rule-based system, we develop an incremental learning method to construct dialogue strategies from the training corpus. Several dialogue service models equipped with the proposed TV interface are explained. To evaluate our model and its impact on an application task, we apply the stand-alone model to an TV settop box called eDi-TV.

Applying IP and Web technologies and the inherent properties of a broadband router widely used at home or in small business, this paper presents a paperless, sharable, plug-and-play, Web-based fax server for multiple users. Instead of using email via a digital network as FoIP, the proposed fax server sends and receives fax documents via the public switched telephone network like the conventional analog fax machines do. The fax server users handle incoming and outgoing faxes by only Web browsers through an IP-based local area network composed of an off-the-shelf broadband router, the proposed fax server, and the users' computers. This paper introduces the system architecture and software driving techniques of the proposed fax server.

In this paper, we present the ubiquitous services system that provides multimedia services, surveillance services and remote control services. This ubiquitous services system keeps the service session based on session initiation protocol (SIP) and supports the uniform interface for connecting the selected service to a suitable device by the operation of a general touch event. The service session of the ubiquitous services system is preserved even though an end-user moves from one computing environment to others. For getting the connected ubiquitous services, all that he has to do is to carry a small mobile pad, such as PDA or Cellular phone, which shows a list of devices that he can use as I/O devices of the on-going service session. He does not have to re-setup the session. When he clicks and selects the proper device among the devices listed on the pad, the session is immediately migrated to the selected device. In this paper, we describe the design of ubiquitous services system based on SIP and X.10 that supports both the user mobility and service session preservation in the ubiquitous wired/wireless network environment.

In this paper we present a novel algorithm for fusion of multimodal surveillance images, based on ICA, which has an improved performance over sensor networks. Improvements have been demonstrated through separate training process for different modalities and the use of a fusion metric to maximise the quality of the fused image. Sparse coding of the coefficients in ICA domain is used to minimize noise transferred from input images into the fused output. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in the sensor network environment, characterized by JPEG 2000 compression and data packetization. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for fusion of multimodal surveillance images, based on ICA, which has an improved performance over sensor networks. Improvements have been demonstrated through separate training process for different modalities and the use of a fusion metric to maximise the quality of the fused image. Sparse coding of the coefficients in ICA domain is used to minimize noise transferred from input images into the fused output. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in the sensor network environment, characterized by JPEG 2000 compression and data packetization.

The paper implements a technique of skipping commercials that can be implemented on media such as DVDRs (digital versatile disc recorders) or HDD (hard disc drive) recorders. This approach makes seamless replay of regular programming uninterrupted by commercials possible. Relatively old and complex tape recording scheme of current VCRs (video cassette recorders) is quickly being replaced with the advanced digital recording schemes on optical discs. The commercial skipping scheme implemented in this paper is applicable to all kinds of PVR (personal video recorder) devices that record broadcasting signals for delayed playback.

Cost-effectiveness is one of the most critical factors in the development of portable consumer devices. The use of compression techniques is a simple but effective solution for achieving such cost-effectiveness. This paper gives a comprehensive analysis of file system level compression techniques for portable consumer devices. Since conventional compressed file systems are optimized for disk like devices and relatively abundant computing resources, they are not suitable for portable devices with small amount of memory and weak processing power. This paper presents the design and implementation of LeCramFS, which is a new read-only compressed file system designed for small portable devices and flash memory. Experiments by implementation show that the proposed file system outperforms conventional ones in terms of memory-efficiency and I/O performance.

This paper presents a continuous calibration scheme to improve playback performance of optical media. Conventional methods are unable to follow small changes in the disc structure. The continuous method proposed in this paper overcomes that problem by adapting to the changes in the shape and structure throughout the disc. This method is simple and straightforward to implement on any consumer DVD system. The initial parameters for the continuous calibration are generated by a three-point optimization method to reduce the computational complexity. The method discussed in this paper improves customer satisfaction by enhancing the playback experience

This paper presents a high-performance low cost sum of absolute difference (SAD) architecture for motion estimation, which consumes a lot of computation and resource in video coding. Unlike many hardware implementations based on complement adders, this paper features the comparison of unsigned numbers to generate partial results of SAD and determine minimum SAD. Furthermore, the compression array unit is implemented by 4-2 compressor. This general-purpose architecture is implemented with a 2-stage pipeline and it is suitable for block-based video compression standards, such as MPEG-4, H.263 and H.264/AVC. Performance analysis shows that compared with other SAD architectures, the proposed architecture reduces 15.3%-22.9% area at almost no cost of latency.

A deinterlacing algorithm that is based on rough sets theory is researched and applied in this paper. The fundamental concepts of rough sets, with upper and lower approximations, offer a powerful means of representing uncertain boundary regions in image processing. However, there are a few studies that discuss the effectiveness of the rough sets concept in the field of engineering. Moreover, the studies involving deinterlacing systems that are based on rough sets have not been proposed yet. Thus, this paper proposes a deinterlacing method that will reliably confirm that the method being tested is the most suitable for the sequence, with almost perfect reliability. This proposed deinterlacing approach employs a size reduction of the database system, keeping only the essential information for the process. Decision making and interpolation results are presented. The results of computer simulations show that the proposed method outperforms a number of methods presented in the literature

The creation of wireless personal area networks (WPANs) offers the consumer electronics industry a mechanism to truly unwire consumer products, leading to portability and ease of installation as never seen before. WPAN's can offer data-rates exceeding those that are required to convey high quality broadcast video, thus users can easily connect to high quality video for multimedia presentations in education, libraries, advertising, or have a wireless connection at home. There have been many WPAN proposals, but this paper concentrates on ECMA-368 as this standard has the largest industrial and implementers' forum backing. With the aim to define and create cost effective consumer electronic equipment this paper discusses the technology behind ECMA-368 physical layer, the design freedom availabilities, the required processing, buffer memory requirements and implementation considerations while concentrating on supporting all the offered data-rates

This paper proposes a way to browse recorded video using closed caption text and chosen keywords. It shows examples of keyword selection for news and sports program. The keyword can be chosen using a Web browser to see the recent news keywords. This paper describes a two-step procedure to browse recorded video. The first step is generating a video index for video clips using closed caption data in video as the synchronized transcript of audio. Then, the viewer may search and play those recorded videos, using the saved closed caption text and video index data. This paper also provides details how to setup database from video and browse video with those indices

In this paper, an integrated music recommendation system is proposed, which contains the functions of automatic music genre classification, automatic music emotion classification, and music similarity query. A novel tempo feature, named as log-scale modulation frequency coefficients, is presented in this paper. With AdaBoost algorithm, the proposed tempo feature is combined with timbre features and improves the performance of music genre and emotion classification. Comparing with the conventional methods based on timbre features, the precision of five-genre classification is enhanced from 86.8% to 92.2% and the accuracy of four-emotion classification is increased from 86.0% to 90.5%. Based on the results of music genre/emotion classification, we design a similarity query scheme, which can speed up the similarity query process without decreasing the precision. Furthermore, all the features employed in this paper are extracted from the data of MP3 partially decoding, which significantly reduces the feature extraction time