School of Computing
Science

Simon Fraser
University

CMPT 820: Multimedia Systems

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Projects

Project Guidelines

• Actual implementation and experimentation of multimedia systems/algorithms are highly preferred.

• You can work alone or in a group of up to 2 students.

• The writ up must be your own. Avoid any type of plagiarism (check the online tutorial on Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism)

• The project must be written using this Latex Template, And it should be between 15 -- 25 pages, and has the following sections.

  • Abstract  < 150 words. What is this project about?

  • Introduction: 1-2 pages. Motivation, brief overview of proposed system, and summary of main results.

  • Related Work: 1-3 pages (must cite and describe at least five related technical papers published in journals or reputable conferences).

  • Proposed System/Algorithm/Idea. Always use a top-down approach in writing: describe the main idea first. Then provide details.

  • Evaluation and Experimentation. Describe the implementation, experimental setup and data collection, and present AND analyze the results. Draw lessons and insights on the results.

  •  Conclusion < 200 words.  Describes the main lessons and findings of the project.

• You must submit a PDF copy of your final report by email to the instructor AND hardcopy handed to the instructor by corresponding deadlines. If you have code, then it must also be submitted with a detailed README file to show how you can compile and run the code (all in one zip archive). 

• Project topic should be related to be somewhat related to multimedia communication, computation, or applications.

• Project could be aligned with your research. But you must state clearly what you did for the course in your project report.

• Project can be:

  • New algorithm/idea related to multimedia. Partial evaluation and validation of the idea should be provided. If your idea is publishable, you may get A+ in this course.

  • Implementation and evaluation of an already-published algorithm/technique/system.

  • Quantitative and/or qualitative comparisons between two already-published algorithm/techniques/systems.

  • A survey of a multimedia topic.
     

Some Project Suggestions (feel free to come up with your own ideas)

•     Experiments with different 3D, VR and 360 video coding, decoding, and/or streaming methods. Evaluate computational efficiency, QoE, storage and network requirements, etc.
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• Develop a 3D video decoder for mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Androdi, and BlackBerry.  You can integrate different open-source libraries with your code. Bonus points if you can get your application approved and available on the AppStrore (or similar web sites).

•  Using Cloud Computing to support computationally-expensive multimedia operations, such as high-quality/3D video encoding and adaptation for different clients. Image understanding and face recognition systems are other examples.

• Multimedia streaming and services for home networking, e.g., transparently transmitting video data from TV to PC or mobile Phones.

• Quantitative comparison between H.264/AVC video coding and the very recent (claimed to be patent-free) VP8 video coder, which is an open video compression format released by Google. More info on VP8 can be found here and at the WebM project. You can use this comparative study between different video coders as a guide. You may also verify whether it is actually patent-free as claimed by Google. 

• IP Phones over high-speed LANs to replace traditional PBX (Private Branch Exchange). You can: (i) implement parts of the solution, or (ii) install, configure, and experiment with open source software package(s) that does this. Could be a group project.

• Implementing a system for detecting copies of videos, which is used for detecting copyright infringements. Some papers asre here and here. Implementation on distributed computing systems such as Haddop is preferred.

• Stream re-writing (simple transcoding) from the new scalable H.264/SVC streams to the common H.264/AVC streams. This would allow regular players (e.g., WM, RealPlayers, VLC) to process SVC streams. There H.264/SVC standard documents have some details on implementing this. Also, you may find some partial or even full implementation as open source. If you find/use open source, you MUST mention it and clearly specify what your new contributions are. Check this document for some information.

• Implementation of an SVC (Scalable Video Coding) decoder on a mobile device such as iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or seamless integration of SVC-->H.264/AVC transcoder (stream re-writer as describe in the above project). That is, a server transmits scalable streams and the mobile receives them. If a mobile does not have an SVC decoder, it will convert the SVC stream into a nonscalable (H/264/AVC) stream and call the standard decoder.

• Implementation of any component of mobile multimedia streaming, such as an Electronic Service Guide for iPhones. See Bell' Mobile TV app for the iPhone. 

• Haptics-based Multimedia Communications. Multimedia applications that interact with biometric sensors (e.g., E-touch, smell, ...). See this paper for an overview. See also the work being done at University of Ottawa.

• Quantitative comparison between different video scalability methods (MDC, Multi-layer, Fine/Medium Grain Scalability, ...)

• Implementation of H.264/SVC on GPUs (we have the hardware in the NSL)

• High Definition (for Cinemas and large screens) Video Encoding and Streaming: Survey and Quantitative Comparison of Different Models.

• Implementation of a video conference system using H.264/SVC (you may use some libraries or open-source code in parts of this project). In 2008, a group of two students did some progress and demonstrated a running system. Their report is available upon request.

• Implementation and evaluation of media gateway router (a router that provides simple QoS for multimedia streams). A sample paper.

• Implementation of a multimedia adaptation gateway to support heterogeneous receivers (wired and wireless).

• Video Streaming and Broadcasting WiMAX, LTE, and other 4G wireless networks. You can evaluate in simulation environments such as OPNET. OPNET has a System in the Loop module that allows you to integrate real devices with simulated components.
   

Old Projects: Fall 2010