Multimedia Systems: Algorithms, Standards, and Industry Practices (Advanced Topics)

MULTIMEDIA: ALGORITHMS, STANDARDS, AND INDUSTRY PRACTICES brings together the different aspects of a modern multimedia pipeline from content creation, compression, distribution and digital rights management. Drawing on their experience in industry, Havaldar and Medioni discuss the issues involved in engineering an end-to-end multimedia pipeline and give plenty of real-world examples including digital television, IPTV, mobile deployments, and digital cinema pipelines. The text also contains up-to-date coverage of current issues in multimedia, including a discussion of MPEG-4 and the current progress in MPEG-21 to create a framework where seamless data exchange will be possible.

Parag Havaldar received a PhD in Computer Vision and Graphics from the University of Southern California in 1996. Since then he has been working in the media industry to design/architect software solutions for the multimedia pipeline from authoring, compression, distribution, digital rights management. Currently, Dr, Havaldar is a software supervisor at SONY Pictures Imageworks, where he leads SONY's proprietory efforts in the area of performance capture. The technology developed by him and his group has been used to create stylized and realistic character animations in a variety of movies including Alice in Wonderland (2010 release), Monster House, Hancock, and Spiderman. Dr. Havaldar also serves as a part time faculty member in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California teaching a graduate course on multimedia.

Professor Gerard Medioni received the Diplôme d'Ingenieur from ENST, Paris in 1977, a M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1980 and 1983 respectively. He has been at USC since then, and is currently Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, co-director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS), and co-director of the USC Games Institute. His research covers a broad spectrum of the field, such as edge detection, stereo and motion analysis, shape inference and description, and system integration. Medioni has published three books, over 50 journal papers and 150 conference articles.