Multiple Sensorial (MulSeMedia) Multi-modal Media: Advances and Applications

Call for Papers

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP)

Multiple Sensorial (MulSeMedia) Multi-modal Media: Advances and Applications 

Multimedia applications have primarily engaged two of the human senses – sight and hearing. With recent advances in computational technology, however it is possible to develop applications that also consider, integrate and synchronize inputs across all senses, including tactile, olfaction, and gustatory. This integration of multiple senses leads to a paradigm shift towards a new mulsemedia (multiple sensorial media) experience, aligning rich data from multiple human senses. Mulsemedia brings with itself new and exciting challenges and opportunities in research, industry, commerce, and academia. This special issue solicits contributions dealing with mulsemedia in all of these areas. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Context-aware Mulsemedia
• Metrics for Mulsemedia
• Capture and synchronization of Mulsemedia
• Mulsemedia devices
• Mulsemedia in distributed environments
• Mulsemedia integration
• Mulsemedia user studies
• Multi-modal mulsemedia interaction
• Mulsemedia and virtual reality
• Quality of service and Mulsemedia 
• Quality of experience and Mulsemedia
• Tactile/haptic interaction
• User modelling and Mulsemedia
• Mulsemedia and e-learning
• Mulsemedia and e-commerce
• Mulsemedia Standards 
• Mulsemedia applications (e.g. e-commerce, e- learning, e-health, etc)
• Emotional response (e.g. EEG) of Mulsemedia
• Mulsemedia sensor research 
• Mulsemedia databases

Important Dates 

• Paper Submission: 14/10/2013
• First Decision: 13/01/2014
• Paper Revision Submission: 03/03/2014
• Second Decision: 28/04/2014
• Accepted Papers Due: 12/05/2014

Guest Editors 

• George Ghinea (Brunel University, UK)
• Stephen Gulliver (University of Reading, UK)
• Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität, Klagenfurt, Austria)
• Weisi Lin (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) 

Prospective contributors are welcome to contact the guest editors at guesteditors2014@kom.tu- darmstadt.de

Submission Procedure

All submission guidelines of TOMCCAP, such as formatting, page limits and extensions of previously-submitted conference papers, must be adhered to. Please see the Authors Guide section of the TOMCCAP website for more details (http://tomccap.acm.org). To submit please follow these instructions:

1. Submit your paper through TOMCCAP’s online system http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tomccap. When submitting please use the Manuscript Type ‘Special Issue: MulSeMedia’ in the ManuscriptCentral system.
2. In your cover letter, include the information “Special Issue on Mulsemedia” and, if submitting an extended version of a conference paper, explain how the new submission is different and extends previously published work. 
3. After you submit your paper, the system will assign a manuscript number to it. Please email this number to guesteditors2014@kom.tu-darmstadt.de together with the title of your paper.

MPEG Workshop on Session Management and Control for MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH)

Co-located with the 105th MPEG Meeting

July 28th, 2013 – Vienna, Austria 

In recent years, the Internet has become an important channel for the delivery of multimedia using HTTP as its primary protocol. In April 2012, ISO/IEC published MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) as an international standard that specified formats for the media presentation description (MPD) and ISO-BMFF/MPEG-2TS segments. As DASH does not define a system or protocol, DASH is considered as an enabler for efficient and high-quality delivery of multimedia content over the Internet.

Currently, MPEG is working towards the 2nd edition of the DASH standard and soliciting contributions related to the DASH delivery covering underlying network protocols (e.g., HTTP 1.1 and 2.0) and infrastructure components (e.g., servers, proxies, caches, CDN). One of the main goals is to understand whether MPEG should do any normative work in the delivery aspects of DASH or can rely on existing standards and other organizations.

Therefore, MPEG will hold a public workshop to bring together experts from various standardization organizations (IETF, MPEG, W3C, 3GPP, etc.), network operators, and (over-the-top) service providers to discuss the delivery aspects of DASH and how to enhance them with the existing standards. Interested parties are kindly invited to submit a position paper providing a title and extended abstract (1-2 pages) related to the following topics:

• Unidirectional/bidirectional, point-to-point/multipoint communication with and without session (management) between servers/CDNs and DASH clients
• Providing content-awareness towards the underlying protocol stack incl. server/network assistance
• Various impacts on the existing Internet infrastructure such as servers, proxies, caches and CDNs 
• QoS and QoE support for DASH-based services
• Scalability in general and specifically for logging interfaces
• Analytics and monitoring of DASH-based services

Important dates: 

• Position paper due: June 15th
• Acceptance notification: June 30th
• Program available: July 10th
• (Free) Workshop Registration by: July 15th
• Workshop date/time: July 28th (9am-1pm)

Please submit your position papers to the workshop chairs:

• Iraj Sodagar, MPEG-DASH AhG&BoG chair, irajs@microsoft.com 
• Thomas Stockhammer, MPEG-DASH editor, c_tstock@qualcomm.com 
• Ali C. Begen, IETF Audio/Video Transport Payloads chair, abegen@cisco.com
• Christian Timmerer, local chair, christian.timmerer@bitmovin.net 

Logistics:

• http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/meetings/105
• http://www.kcmweb.de/conferences/mpeg_105/mpeg105.html

MPEG News Archive

This blog posts provides a list of recent MPEG news reports which I'm compiling after every MPEG meeting I'm attending. I thought it's a good idea, specifically because SIGMM records decided to publish them also.

In case you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to comment or contact me directly.

• MPEG news: a report from the 103rd meeting, Geneva, Switzerland
• MPEG news: a report from the 102nd meeting, Shanghai, China
• MPEG news: a report from the 101st meeting, Stockholm, Sweden
• MPEG news: a report from the 100th meeting, Geneva, CH
• MPEG news: a report from the 99th meeting, San Jose, CA, USA
• MPEG news: a report from the 98th meeting, Geneva, Switzerland
• MPEG news: a report from the 97th meeting, Torino, Italy
• MPEG news: a report from the 95th meeting, Daegu, Korea
• MPEG news: a report from the 93rd meeting, Geneva, Switzerland

The official MPEG press releases can be also found here and here.

Panel at Streaming Forum 2013 on "DASH and HEVC: New Standards Enabling Ultra-High Quality Video Services"

Streaming Forum 2013

Park Plaza Victoria, London, UK

June 18-19, 2013

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/conference/2013/

Streaming Forum 2013 is a new, cutting-edge conference for pioneers, practitioners and decision makers. Since 2006, the Streaming Media Europe Conference has played an integral part in driving the exponential growth in IP delivery of rich media. It continues to serve as a catalyst for cutting-edge developments in online video and audio across all sectors.

This years' conference will focus on the streaming media game-changers that will continue to drive industry to new heights in the coming years, with a special emphasis on the following topics:

• Media & Entertainment
• Corporate Communications
• Education & Training
• Sport
• Live Event Webcasting
• Encoding & Transcoding
• Formats, Protocols, & Standards
• Video Infrastructure

In this context, we will have a panel on "DASH and HEVC: New Standards Enabling Ultra-High Quality Video Services", also supported by the DASH Industry Forum.

The first versions of the DASH and HEVC standards have recently been approved and the first services will soon be deployed. Additionally, the DASH Industry Forum was established to provide interoperability guidelines for DASH-based services, recently provided DASH264 for community review, and is working towards guidelines for HEVC and beyond. The panel aims to identify issues and possible solutions for the successful deployment of DASH and HEVC from the content, service, and network providers' point of view as well as from device and equipment manufacturers.

Moderator: Christian Timmerer, CEO | Head of Research, bitmovin & Assistant Professor at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria

Panelists:

• Thomas Stockhammer, Consultant, Technical Standards, Qualcomm
• Ali C. Begen, Lead Engineer, Video and Content Platforms Research and Advanced Development Group, CISCO
• Thomas Schierl, Head of Multimedia Communications Group, Fraunhofer/HHI
• Gilles Teniou, Head of Video Standardisation, Orange
• Bram Tullemans, Project manager Software platforms & Broadband networks for the EBU Technology & Innovation department, Switzerland

QUALINET Multimedia Databases

A key for current and future developments in Quality of Experience resides in a rich and internationally recognized database of content of different sorts, and to share such a database with the scientific community at large. The QUALINET Database platform takes the necessary steps to make them accessible to all researchers:

http://dbq.multimediatech.cz/

(registration is free of charge)

Currently, the QUALINET database comprises 122 multimedia databases, based on literature/Internet search and input from Qualinet partner laboratories. They're mostly image (~52) or video datasets (~68), with (~57) or w/o subjective quality rating, special content, e.g. 3D (~23), FV, eyetracking (~21), audio, audiovisual (~8), HDR, and other modalities.

The documentation of the QUALINET databases can be found on the corresponding Wiki page. For an overview, please consult the white paper on QUALINET databases (PDF) and please reference it as follows:

Karel Fliegel, Christian Timmerer, (eds.), “WG4 Databases White Paper v1.5: QUALINET Multimedia Database enabling QoE Evaluations and Benchmarking”, Prague/Klagenfurt, Czech Republic/Austria, Version 1.5, March 2013.

Finally, you're welcome to contribute to this effort, simply send an email to wg4.qualinet@listes.epfl.ch and briefly describe your dataset [to subscribe, send an e-mail (its content is unimportant) to wg4.qualinet-subscribe@listes.epfl.ch, you will receive information to confirm your subscription, and upon the acceptance of the moderator will be included in the mailing-list].

Additionally, you may consider submitting a dataset paper to QoMEX or MMSys which hosts dataset tracks and accepted dataset paper will be automatically included within the QUALINET database.

JSAC Special Issue: Adaptive Media Streaming

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC)

Call for Papers

Special Issue on Adaptive Media Streaming

Submission Deadline: April 1 April 15, 2013 (***Happy Easter!***)

[ PDF ]

Recently, traditional TV services, Internet TV and mobile streaming services have started converging, and it is expected that this convergence trend will continue with other services. Additionally, new emerging multimedia services are being introduced. These developments in the multimedia arena mean that various content and services will be delivered over different networks, and the users expect to consume these services using those networks, depending on the availability and reach of the network at the time of consumption. This massive heterogeneity in terms of terminal/network capabilities and user expectations requires efficient solutions for the transport of modern media in an interoperable and universal fashion. In particular, in recent years, the Internet has become an important channel for the delivery of multimedia. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is widely used on the Internet and it has also become a primary protocol for the delivery of multimedia content.

Additionally, standards developing organizations (SDOs) such as MPEG have developed various technologies for multimedia transport and encapsulation, e.g., MPEG2-TS (Transport Stream) and MPEG4 file format. These technologies have been widely adopted and are heavily deployed by various providers and in different applications and services, such as digital broadcasting, audio and video transport over the Internet and streaming to mobile phones, etc. At the same time, many other SDOs such as the IETF, IEEE, and 3GPP have provided various protocols to deliver multimedia content packetized or packaged by such MPEG transport technologies.

This special issue solicits novel contributions and breaking results on all aspects of Adaptive Streaming of Multimedia. The main objectives of this special issue are (but not limited to):

• Efficient delivery of multimedia content in an adaptive, progressive download/streaming fashion (incl. over HTTP);
• Support for streaming of live multimedia, to mobile users, low-capacity channels, bandwidth variations, as well as multipoint streaming over heterogeneous channels or paths;
• Efficient and ease of use of existing content distribution infrastructure components such as CDNs, proxies, caches, NATs and firewalls;
• Efficient content generation (encoding) techniques for content delivery (e.g., segmentation);
• Detailed performance analyses of deployed standard technologies or that uncover and rectify major problems in the behavior of such technologies;
• Measurement techniques for collecting consumption data (both application and transport-level performance metrics, viewer behavior, etc.) in content delivery;
• The effects of adaptation techniques on the end-user quality of experience;
• Viewer experiences from large-scale experiments and events (such as Olympics, World Cup, etc.).

Guest Editors

• Christian Timmerer, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
• Ali C. Begen, CISCO, Canada
• Thomas Stockhammer, QUALCOMM, USA 
• Carsten Griwodz, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway 
• Bernd Girod, Stanford University, USA 

Important Dates

• 1st Submission: Apr 15, 2013
• Reviews Available: Jul 15, 2013
• 2nd Submission: Aug 31, 2013
• Final Acceptance Decision: Oct 31, 2013
• Camera-ready: Dec 1, 2013
• Publication: 2nd quarter 2014

Submission Procedure 

Prospective authors should prepare their submissions in accordance with the rules specified in the 'Information for Authors' section of the JSAC guidelines (http://www.jsac.ucsd.edu/Guidelines/info.html). Papers should be submitted through EDAS (https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=14755). Prior to submitting their papers for review, authors should make sure that they understand and agree to adhere to the over-length page charge policy presented in the JSAC guidelines.

Contact: Christian Timmerer, christian.timmerer@itec.aau.at, http://research.timmerer.com

DASH-related papers at NOSSDAV, MoVid, and MMSys 2013, Feb 27 - Mar 1, Oslo, Norway

NOSSDAV and MoVid are co-located with MMSys'13 which had a couple of interesting papers related to DASH. The title and abstract is provided here and the proceedings of all three event will be available at the ACM digital library soon.

NOSSDAV

Title: Server-Based Traffic Shaping for Stabilizing Oscillating Adaptive Streaming Players
Authors: S. Akhshabi, L. Anantakrishnan, C. Dovrolis, A. Begen
Abstract: Prior work has shown that two or more adaptive streaming players can be unstable when they compete for bandwidth. The root cause of the instability problem is that, in Steady-State, a player goes through an ON-OFF activity pattern in which it overestimates the available bandwidth. We propose a server-based traffic shaping method that can significantly reduce such oscillations without significant (or any) loss in bandwidth utilization. The shaper is only activated when oscillations are detected, and it dynamically adjusts the shaping rate so that the player should ideally receive the highest available video profile while being stable. We evaluate the proposed method experimentally in terms of instability and utilization comparing with the unshaped case, under several scenarios.

MMSys

Title: SABRE: A Client Based Technique for Mitigating the Buffer Bloat Effect of Adaptive Video Flows
Authors: Ahmed Mansy, Bill Ver Steeg, Mostafa Ammar
Abstract: HTTP adaptive video streaming is an emerging technology that aims to deliver video quality to clients in a manner that accommodates available bandwidth and its fluctuations. In this scheme, a video stream is split at the server into small video files encoded at multiple bitrates. The video is composed at the client by downloading these files over HTTP and TCP. Although there are some efforts to standardize media representation for this technology, adaptation techniques remain an open area for development. Recently, an alarm was raised by a study about the interaction between TCP congestion control algorithms and large buffers on the Internet. Queuing delays when these buffers are full can reach several hundreds of milliseconds in a phenomenon that was dubbed buffer bloat. In this paper we use measurements on a testbed to demonstrate and quantify the buffer bloat effect of HTTP adaptive streaming. We show that in a typical residential setting a single video stream can easily cause queuing delays up to one second and even more hence seriously degrading the performance of other applications sharing the home network. We develop SABRE (Smooth Adaptive Bit RatE), a scheme that can be implemented by the client to mitigate this problem. We implemented SABRE in the VLC player. Using our testbed, we show that our technique can reduce buffer occupancy and significantly diminish the buffer bloat effect without affecting the experience of the video viewer.

Title: Distributed DASH Dataset
Authors: S. Lederer, C. Mueller, C. Timmerer, C. Concolato, J. Feuvre, K. Fliegel
Abstract: The delivery of multimedia content over HTTP and on top of existing Internet infrastructures is becoming the preferred method within heterogeneous environment. The basic design principle is having an intelligent client which selects given and applicable media representations by issuing HTTP requests for individual segments based on the users' context and current conditions. Typically, this client behavior differs between implementations of the same kind and for the objective evaluations thereof appropriate datasets are needed. This paper presents a distributed dataset for the recently published MPEG-DASH standard which is mirrored at different sites across Europe, namely Klagenfurt, Paris, and Prague. A client implementation may choose to request segments from these sites and dynamically switch to a different location, e.g., in case the one currently used causes any issues. Hence, this distributed DASH dataset can be used for real-world evaluations enabling the simulation of switching between different content delivery networks. Finally, it is also offers a registration service for additional sites to join and, thus, expand the distribution of the dataset even further.

Title: Live HTTP Streaming of Video and Subtitles within a Browser
Authors: C. Concolato, J. Feuvre
Abstract: Video streaming has become a very popular application on the web, with rich player interfaces and subtitle integration. Additionally, live streaming solutions are deployed based on HTTP Streaming solutions. However, the integration of video and subtitles in live streaming solutions still poses some problems. This paper describes a demonstration of live streaming of video and subtitle data using the MPEG-DASH technology and its synchronous playback in a web browser. It presents the formats, architecture and technical choices made for this demonstration and shows that it is feasible with upcoming browsers, paving the way for richer web video applications.