A manifesto on the future of image coding - JPEG Pleno
Touradj Ebrahimi
JPEG Convener
Tremendous progress has been achieved in the way consumers and professionals capture, store, distribute, display and ultimately use images. We have been witnessing an ever growing acceleration in creation and usage of images in all sectors, applications, products and services. This widespread and still growing use of images has brought new challenges for which solutions should be found. Among others, image annotation, search and management, imaging security and in particular privacy, efficient image storage, seamless image communication, new imaging modalities, and enhanced imaging experiences are just a few examples of challenges to which scientific community, industry, service providers, and entrepreneurs have responded in the past, including continuing improvement of existing solutions and creating new ones.
During 25 years, Joint Picture Experts Group (JPEG) has been an example of such efforts, and has offered image coding standards which can cope with some of the above challenges. This has resulted in a series of successful and widely adopted coding algorithms and file formats such as JPEG and JPEG 2000.
JPEG format is today a synonymous of modern digital imaging, and one of the most popular and widely used standards in the history. Images created in JPEG format now exceeds 1 billion per day in their number, and most of us can count a couple, if not more JPEG engines in devices we regularly use in our daily lives; in our mobile phones, in our computers, in our tablets, and of course in our cameras. JPEG ecosystem is strong and continues an exponential growth for the foreseeable future. A significant number of small and large companies created in the last two decades have been relying on JPEG format, and this trend will likely continue.
A question to ask our selves is: will we continue to have the same relationship to flat snapshots in time (the so-called Kodak moments) we call pictures, or could there be a different and enhanced experience created when capturing and using images, that could go beyond the experience images have been providing us for the last 120 years?
Several researchers, artists, professionals, and entrepreneurs have been asking this same question and attempting to find answers with more or less success. Stereoscopic and multi-view photography, panoramic and 360-degree imaging, image fusion, points cloud plus texture imaging, high dynamic range imaging, integral imaging, light field imaging, and holographic imaging are among exemples of solutions that have been proposed as future of imaging.
The offered experience based on the above solutions obviously depends largely on the state of the maturity of technologies behind them, and their implementation, including the content created by them, the type of usage and relationship they offer to professionals and consumers. It is normal to expect that with enough efforts and resources, as well as enough time, some will have the potential of reaching a level of maturity that can make them good candidates to offer an experience beyond what exists today.
However, the way such solutions are introduced has probably as much importance as the solutions themselves. The JPEG ecosystem is huge, and offers sufficient experience for what it is expected to offer. The legacy that JPEG brings should not be underestimated. In fact, several attempts have been made in the past by companies, as well as by standardisation organisations, including the JPEG committee itself, to replace the JPEG format by an alternative. Success has been limited if not inexistent in many of such attempts.
Introduction of new imaging experiences should therefore be done in a smooth and gradual way without disruption of the existing JPEG ecosystem, but by enhancing it for those wanting it, while still offering the old experience to those who don't. JPEG backward compatible standards are therefore essential in introduction of new imaging standards, and should be given the attention they deserve, when assessing future image coding standards.
Recently, JPEG standardisation committee has created an initiative called JPEG Pleno. “Pleno” is a reference to “Plenoptic” a mathematical representation, which not only provides color information of a specific point in a scene, but also how it changes when observed from different directions and distances. “Pleno” is also the latin word for “complete”, a reference to the vision of the JPEG committee that believes future imaging will provide a more complete description of scenes well beyond what is possible today.
The road-map for JPEG Pleno follows a path that starts in 2015 and will continue beyond 2020, with the objective of making the same type of impact that the original JPEG format has had on today's digital imaging starting from 20 years ago. Several milestones are in work to approach the ultimate image representation in well-thought, precise, and useful steps. Each step could potentially offer an enhanced experience when compared to the previous, immediately ready to be used in applications, with backward compatibility. Backward compatibility could be either at the coding or at the file format level, allowing an old JPEG decoder of 20 years ago to still be able to decode an image, even if that image won’t take full advantage of the intended experience, which will be only offered with a JPEG Pleno decoder. Examples of potential milestones include panoramic and 360-degree images, fused images, and light-field images. Stay tuned as JPEG committee clarifies and shares its plans and achievements for JPEG Pleno in the coming months and if you want to join this effort, do not hesitate to drop me an email to Touradj.Ebrahimi@epfl.ch.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Apple's incompetence - Read if you plan to move to iCloud
It has been 10 days since Apple MobileMe has lost all my email messages, and there is no trace of any recovery, after several hours of chat with support, and many emails exchanged.
Bottom line is:
- Apple considers you responsible of your own data, and if they loose your data, they do not feel responsible.
- MobileMe which was a paying service until a few months ago (and for which I had already paid until the end of the year), does not seem to offer even basic services that other free email services like Yahoo! or Google offer.
- Apple staff in MobileMe support are slow and completely incompetent. Every email sent takes 48 hours for a return which often is completely useless.
In any case, read what follows if you have time, and especially if you plan to move to iCloud. You have been warned. Apple is willing to host your data, but not willing to keep it for you.
I have replaced by ****** information about the name of the incompetent staff to protect their privacy, in case the name is his true name.
From: "Ebrahimi Prof. Dr. Touradj"
Date: June 25, 2011 10:09:41 AM GMT+02:00
To: internetservicesmm_en@euro.apple.com
Cc: "Ebrahimi Prof. Dr. Touradj", touradj_ebrahimi@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: MobileMe Request: ebrahimi@me.com;
Follow-up: 156245052
Hello,
I checked and the recovered emails you are referring to, which are just a few messages, date back to emails AFTER the incident happened which cause loss of all my emails. As I have repeated several times in my previous exchanges both on chat and by emails during the last 10 days, I immediately switched my main email to an MS Exchange server, and what your engineers have recovered is of no use to me, because they concern messages AFTER the incident, starting June 16th, which I ALREADY HAVE!
What I want to have are emails BEFORE the incident, which happened on June 15th CET.
Is this so complicated to understand, and I should repeat it so many times?
I am very disappointed with the very poor service from MobileMe, an Apple brand which is a shame for your company which has the reputation of offering good products and services. I have the impression to talk to completely incompetent persons, who don't even understand simple things like recovering emails BEFORE the incident which happened June 15 CET.
Your staff caused loss of my emails because of a bug in your software or server, or maintenance routines, followed by bad instructions given to me from MobileMe support. It is easy to prove, as all happened while I was on chat with support and I am sure you have a transcript of it. I have them in case you don't. You took 10 days to tell me you have recovered SOME emails, which is not even true. And I remind you that I got several days ago the same email from you, and I gave you the same answer.
The chat transcript I have from the first supervisor I talked to on June 15th, was saying I will have my emails recovered in 48 hours which I replied to as too long and totally unacceptable. It is now 240 hours later, and they are still not recovered!
In any case. I went ahead and recovered my emails from a backup at the price of two of inactivity, because I really needed my emails for work.
Your incompetence is causing important problems in the progress of my work, and I could not sit and wait for you to recover my emails after 10 days, and at least partially recovered what I could from my backups.
But, the emails from the last backup I had (14June) which is the day before you loose all my emails could not be recovered.
So, thanks for not being able to recover my emails! I did it myself up to June 14th from my own backups.
WHAT I NEED NOW IS THE EMAILS LOST ON 14JUNE and 15JUNE, because I do not continuously back up my emails every minute.
If you cannot do it, tell me once for all. And I don't need email sent from June 16th. So, don't waste your time and mine anymore recovering them.
T. Ebrahimi
P.S. I take the liberty of sharing the content of our email exchanges and the chats with some people.
On Jun 25, 2011, at 4:43 AM, internetservicesmm_en@euro.apple.com wrote:
Dear Touradj,
Thank you for your prompt reply. I'm pleased to report that MobileMe engineers were able to recover some of your missing email messages. The messages are in the Inbox. To see this folder, go to MobileMe Mail at http://www.me.com/mail and log in. If you have Mac OS X Mail configured to check your MobileMe email, you should also be able to see the folder of recovered messages in Mail.
Please note that this recovery was an exception to the MobileMe Terms and Conditions, which advise that MobileMe members are responsible for backing up their own data. Apple will not be able to offer future exceptions of this nature. For more information, please see:
http://www.apple.com/legal/mobileme/en/terms.html
This would be the extent of the recovery possible for your account.
If you would like assistance using your Time Machine backup, you may contact AppleCare at (41) 0848 000 132. We do apologize for any inconvenience in this matter.
Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I will be happy to help.
Sincerely,
************
MobileMe Senior Advisor
-----------------------------------
Hello,
I checked me.com/mail and there is no trace of any recovered emails there.
Can you check again?
Regarding the responsibility of the user to back up their own data, let me make two comments that I already made the very first time this problem happened:
- The loss of the emails on my MobileMe did not happen because of me, but because there was a glitch in MobileMe and I could not synchronize my Mail application on my Apple computer with the MobileMe. However, I could see my emails by going to me.com/Mail. It was after I contacted the support using chat, that I was asked to follow a certain number of instructions, and this led to the loss of all my mails in inbox and other Folders I had archived messages.
I have copies of the chats with your support, and I am sure you have copies of them too. At no time, the support adviser asked me or warned me that I need to backup my emails before following instructions, or if I had a back up. Is this how Apple wants to convince me and other users to move all our data to iCloud?
You are willing to host our data, but not willing to keep it? Can you explain what is the difference between MobileMe, a paying service, as far as I am concerned, because I paid for it, and Google or Yahoo mail services?
- I have regularly backed up my emails with Time Capsule and in fact my latest backup dated back to the day before when my emails were removed.
So, I can recover myself most of the emails if somebody can help me with it. But I don't have back up of emails for some 15 hours prior to the accident. Who can help me to at least recover my emails that are in backup using Time Machine, by giving me step by step instructions? Who can recover these last 15 or so hours of emails before the accident?
Best regards
T. Ebrahimi
On Jun 22, 2011, at 11:49 AM, internetservicesmm_en@euro.apple.com wrote:
Dear Touradj,
Thank you for you patience regarding this matter. Due to the nature of this case, recovery has been a relatively time-consuming affair. We have managed to recover some email data, which is now listed on the MobileMe account and should be viewable at me.com/mail.
If you were missing more messages than this, please let me know and we can attempt to look further into another possible recovery.
Please note that this recovery was an exception to the MobileMe Terms and Conditions, which advise that MobileMe members are responsible for backing up their own data. Apple will not be able to offer future exceptions of this nature. For more information, please see:
http://www.apple.com/legal/mobileme/en/terms.html
To prevent data loss in the future, we strongly suggest that you back up your files regularly. You can create multiple backups of your important files using Backup and Time Machine. You can also use Time Machine to create custom burn folders and archive your mailboxes to them. The more backups you have, the more protected you are.
If you wish to leave feedback apart from the survey you may receive at the end of our email exchange, you may do so here for issues pertaining to the MobileMe service:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/mobileme.html
Please do let me know about the current data in the account and whether we should attempt another restore. Once again, thank you for your patience.
Sincerely,
**************
MobileMe Senior Advisor
---------------------------------
Hi,
Not only I have not received a reply to my last query since more than 24 hours, it is now a week since my emails on MobileMe have been lost due to reasons unknown to me. I was told when this occurred that the issue will be resolved in 48 hours.
Can you please reply to me and answer to my questions?
When will I have the lost emails recovered?
Without any response from you, I will be forced to take other actions.
Best regards
T. Ebrahimi
On Jun 20, 2011, at 7:51 AM, Ebrahimi Touradj wrote:
Sorry, but I don't understand what you need to investigate?
SInce 15 of June my emails have been removed form MobileMe, and this is not my fault but either a bug in your system or the wrong instructions I received when I contacted the support. I have the details of the chat with support for my case and I am sure you have access to these too. So it is easy to see this when reading them.
I am a paying MobileMe customer who decided to pay for a service that you can find for free anywhere else like on yahoo or google, because I expect when problems happen I receive a service.
What is so complicated with you taking 6 days now to investigate and keep saying you are investigating?
How can you even think about sending me an email like this after 6 days of waiting and give me no details nor any expected date when I will have the back up of my emails accessible to me? This is the worst service I have ever seen, and frankly a share for Apple.
Get the back up of my inbox and my folders, as of the evening of June 14th CET, and put it either on MobileMe under recovery folder or on some place I can take it from.
I have already switched from MobileMe to Microsoft exchange and emails from June 15th are handled with a different mail system.
Some residual emails still going to MobileMe are not important.
At this point, I would like to make an official complaint to Apple because of lack of service to help me, which has cause me serious delays in my work, as I cannot access the removed emails.
Please send me how I can make an official complaint and to whom it should be sent. Who is your superior and please send to me his/her email address.
T. Ebrahimi
On Jun 20, 2011, at 5:25 AM, internetservicesmm_en@euro.apple.com wrote:
Dear Touradj,
Thank you for your reply. At the present time, we are investigating the issue you reported regarding the missing email data. Once we have more information regarding the data in question, I will let you know as soon as possible.
Thank you once again for your patience. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I will be happy to help.
Sincerely,
*************
MobileMe Senior Advisor
-------------------------
Hi,
The server seems to be working again. I receive emails. But this is not the problem I was asking to be resolved.
The much more important problem that remains is where are my emails and folders from June 15th backward.
This is the issue I have been waiting for Apple to resolve.
I have now switched my email server and my main email address to an MS Exchange server. So, if the MobileMe mail server now works or not, is not an issue for me anymore. I have switched to another service provider.
But, as a result of following instructions from the MobileMe support when I contacted them by chat to report the problem of sync between my Mail application and MobileMe, all my older folders and inbox emails received up to the time when I reported the problem were removed from my account.
I talked to a senior advisor and was told I will be contacted in 48 hours which I did not.
So, let me ask again the same I have been asking in the last days.
Where are my old emails folders and inbox dating back to 15 June and before?
What is the status of recovering them?
The senior advisor told me they will be on my MobileMe mail folders once recovered under a folder called recovered or something like that.
Thanks for your prompt response.
Best regards
T. Ebrahimi
On Jun 18, 2011, at 7:06 AM, internetservicesmm_en@euro.apple.com wrote:
Dear Touradj,
My name is ***********, a MobileMe Senior Advisor. I sincerely appreciate your patience as the MobileMe Support team has investigated the issue you reported regarding syncing. I am sorry that the issue is not yet resolved.
I would appreciate it if you could check whether you are able to access and view mail at http://me.com/mail at this time. If you are not able to do so, and if you see any error messages, please reply to this email and include the exact error message text.
Thank you for your patience. I look forward to helping you with this issue.
Sincerely,
************
MobileMe Senior Advisor
Bottom line is:
- Apple considers you responsible of your own data, and if they loose your data, they do not feel responsible.
- MobileMe which was a paying service until a few months ago (and for which I had already paid until the end of the year), does not seem to offer even basic services that other free email services like Yahoo! or Google offer.
- Apple staff in MobileMe support are slow and completely incompetent. Every email sent takes 48 hours for a return which often is completely useless.
In any case, read what follows if you have time, and especially if you plan to move to iCloud. You have been warned. Apple is willing to host your data, but not willing to keep it for you.
I have replaced by ****** information about the name of the incompetent staff to protect their privacy, in case the name is his true name.
From: "Ebrahimi Prof. Dr. Touradj"
Date: June 25, 2011 10:09:41 AM GMT+02:00
To: internetservicesmm_en@euro.apple.com
Cc: "Ebrahimi Prof. Dr. Touradj"
Subject: Re: MobileMe Request: ebrahimi@me.com;
Follow-up: 156245052
Hello,
I checked and the recovered emails you are referring to, which are just a few messages, date back to emails AFTER the incident happened which cause loss of all my emails. As I have repeated several times in my previous exchanges both on chat and by emails during the last 10 days, I immediately switched my main email to an MS Exchange server, and what your engineers have recovered is of no use to me, because they concern messages AFTER the incident, starting June 16th, which I ALREADY HAVE!
What I want to have are emails BEFORE the incident, which happened on June 15th CET.
Is this so complicated to understand, and I should repeat it so many times?
I am very disappointed with the very poor service from MobileMe, an Apple brand which is a shame for your company which has the reputation of offering good products and services. I have the impression to talk to completely incompetent persons, who don't even understand simple things like recovering emails BEFORE the incident which happened June 15 CET.
Your staff caused loss of my emails because of a bug in your software or server, or maintenance routines, followed by bad instructions given to me from MobileMe support. It is easy to prove, as all happened while I was on chat with support and I am sure you have a transcript of it. I have them in case you don't. You took 10 days to tell me you have recovered SOME emails, which is not even true. And I remind you that I got several days ago the same email from you, and I gave you the same answer.
The chat transcript I have from the first supervisor I talked to on June 15th, was saying I will have my emails recovered in 48 hours which I replied to as too long and totally unacceptable. It is now 240 hours later, and they are still not recovered!
In any case. I went ahead and recovered my emails from a backup at the price of two of inactivity, because I really needed my emails for work.
Your incompetence is causing important problems in the progress of my work, and I could not sit and wait for you to recover my emails after 10 days, and at least partially recovered what I could from my backups.
But, the emails from the last backup I had (14June) which is the day before you loose all my emails could not be recovered.
So, thanks for not being able to recover my emails! I did it myself up to June 14th from my own backups.
WHAT I NEED NOW IS THE EMAILS LOST ON 14JUNE and 15JUNE, because I do not continuously back up my emails every minute.
If you cannot do it, tell me once for all. And I don't need email sent from June 16th. So, don't waste your time and mine anymore recovering them.
T. Ebrahimi
P.S. I take the liberty of sharing the content of our email exchanges and the chats with some people.
On Jun 25, 2011, at 4:43 AM, internetservicesmm_en@euro.apple.com wrote:
Dear Touradj,
Thank you for your prompt reply. I'm pleased to report that MobileMe engineers were able to recover some of your missing email messages. The messages are in the Inbox. To see this folder, go to MobileMe Mail at http://www.me.com/mail and log in. If you have Mac OS X Mail configured to check your MobileMe email, you should also be able to see the folder of recovered messages in Mail.
Please note that this recovery was an exception to the MobileMe Terms and Conditions, which advise that MobileMe members are responsible for backing up their own data. Apple will not be able to offer future exceptions of this nature. For more information, please see:
http://www.apple.com/legal/mobileme/en/terms.html
This would be the extent of the recovery possible for your account.
If you would like assistance using your Time Machine backup, you may contact AppleCare at (41) 0848 000 132. We do apologize for any inconvenience in this matter.
Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I will be happy to help.
Sincerely,
************
MobileMe Senior Advisor
-----------------------------------
Hello,
I checked me.com/mail and there is no trace of any recovered emails there.
Can you check again?
Regarding the responsibility of the user to back up their own data, let me make two comments that I already made the very first time this problem happened:
- The loss of the emails on my MobileMe did not happen because of me, but because there was a glitch in MobileMe and I could not synchronize my Mail application on my Apple computer with the MobileMe. However, I could see my emails by going to me.com/Mail. It was after I contacted the support using chat, that I was asked to follow a certain number of instructions, and this led to the loss of all my mails in inbox and other Folders I had archived messages.
I have copies of the chats with your support, and I am sure you have copies of them too. At no time, the support adviser asked me or warned me that I need to backup my emails before following instructions, or if I had a back up. Is this how Apple wants to convince me and other users to move all our data to iCloud?
You are willing to host our data, but not willing to keep it? Can you explain what is the difference between MobileMe, a paying service, as far as I am concerned, because I paid for it, and Google or Yahoo mail services?
- I have regularly backed up my emails with Time Capsule and in fact my latest backup dated back to the day before when my emails were removed.
So, I can recover myself most of the emails if somebody can help me with it. But I don't have back up of emails for some 15 hours prior to the accident. Who can help me to at least recover my emails that are in backup using Time Machine, by giving me step by step instructions? Who can recover these last 15 or so hours of emails before the accident?
Best regards
T. Ebrahimi
On Jun 22, 2011, at 11:49 AM, internetservicesmm_en@euro.apple.com wrote:
Dear Touradj,
Thank you for you patience regarding this matter. Due to the nature of this case, recovery has been a relatively time-consuming affair. We have managed to recover some email data, which is now listed on the MobileMe account and should be viewable at me.com/mail.
If you were missing more messages than this, please let me know and we can attempt to look further into another possible recovery.
Please note that this recovery was an exception to the MobileMe Terms and Conditions, which advise that MobileMe members are responsible for backing up their own data. Apple will not be able to offer future exceptions of this nature. For more information, please see:
http://www.apple.com/legal/mobileme/en/terms.html
To prevent data loss in the future, we strongly suggest that you back up your files regularly. You can create multiple backups of your important files using Backup and Time Machine. You can also use Time Machine to create custom burn folders and archive your mailboxes to them. The more backups you have, the more protected you are.
If you wish to leave feedback apart from the survey you may receive at the end of our email exchange, you may do so here for issues pertaining to the MobileMe service:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/mobileme.html
Please do let me know about the current data in the account and whether we should attempt another restore. Once again, thank you for your patience.
Sincerely,
**************
MobileMe Senior Advisor
---------------------------------
Hi,
Not only I have not received a reply to my last query since more than 24 hours, it is now a week since my emails on MobileMe have been lost due to reasons unknown to me. I was told when this occurred that the issue will be resolved in 48 hours.
Can you please reply to me and answer to my questions?
When will I have the lost emails recovered?
Without any response from you, I will be forced to take other actions.
Best regards
T. Ebrahimi
On Jun 20, 2011, at 7:51 AM, Ebrahimi Touradj wrote:
Sorry, but I don't understand what you need to investigate?
SInce 15 of June my emails have been removed form MobileMe, and this is not my fault but either a bug in your system or the wrong instructions I received when I contacted the support. I have the details of the chat with support for my case and I am sure you have access to these too. So it is easy to see this when reading them.
I am a paying MobileMe customer who decided to pay for a service that you can find for free anywhere else like on yahoo or google, because I expect when problems happen I receive a service.
What is so complicated with you taking 6 days now to investigate and keep saying you are investigating?
How can you even think about sending me an email like this after 6 days of waiting and give me no details nor any expected date when I will have the back up of my emails accessible to me? This is the worst service I have ever seen, and frankly a share for Apple.
Get the back up of my inbox and my folders, as of the evening of June 14th CET, and put it either on MobileMe under recovery folder or on some place I can take it from.
I have already switched from MobileMe to Microsoft exchange and emails from June 15th are handled with a different mail system.
Some residual emails still going to MobileMe are not important.
At this point, I would like to make an official complaint to Apple because of lack of service to help me, which has cause me serious delays in my work, as I cannot access the removed emails.
Please send me how I can make an official complaint and to whom it should be sent. Who is your superior and please send to me his/her email address.
T. Ebrahimi
On Jun 20, 2011, at 5:25 AM, internetservicesmm_en@euro.apple.com wrote:
Dear Touradj,
Thank you for your reply. At the present time, we are investigating the issue you reported regarding the missing email data. Once we have more information regarding the data in question, I will let you know as soon as possible.
Thank you once again for your patience. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I will be happy to help.
Sincerely,
*************
MobileMe Senior Advisor
-------------------------
Hi,
The server seems to be working again. I receive emails. But this is not the problem I was asking to be resolved.
The much more important problem that remains is where are my emails and folders from June 15th backward.
This is the issue I have been waiting for Apple to resolve.
I have now switched my email server and my main email address to an MS Exchange server. So, if the MobileMe mail server now works or not, is not an issue for me anymore. I have switched to another service provider.
But, as a result of following instructions from the MobileMe support when I contacted them by chat to report the problem of sync between my Mail application and MobileMe, all my older folders and inbox emails received up to the time when I reported the problem were removed from my account.
I talked to a senior advisor and was told I will be contacted in 48 hours which I did not.
So, let me ask again the same I have been asking in the last days.
Where are my old emails folders and inbox dating back to 15 June and before?
What is the status of recovering them?
The senior advisor told me they will be on my MobileMe mail folders once recovered under a folder called recovered or something like that.
Thanks for your prompt response.
Best regards
T. Ebrahimi
On Jun 18, 2011, at 7:06 AM, internetservicesmm_en@euro.apple.com wrote:
Dear Touradj,
My name is ***********, a MobileMe Senior Advisor. I sincerely appreciate your patience as the MobileMe Support team has investigated the issue you reported regarding syncing. I am sorry that the issue is not yet resolved.
I would appreciate it if you could check whether you are able to access and view mail at http://me.com/mail at this time. If you are not able to do so, and if you see any error messages, please reply to this email and include the exact error message text.
Thank you for your patience. I look forward to helping you with this issue.
Sincerely,
************
MobileMe Senior Advisor
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Resistance is futile! Become part of the Borg collective.
Privacy is one of those things intimately linked to individualism, and one of the fundamental needs of any human being. Obviously, the definition of privacy and its degree, or even its importance, largely depends on ones personality, age, and culture, among others. Recently, with the proliferation of video surveillance systems across cities, issues such solutions created for the privacy of individuals have been raised, and are among hot topics in discussions and debates around video surveillance. Other new information and communication technologies are also bringing their share of invasion of privacy. Recently, The Swiss Federal Commissioner for Data Protection announced they are taking Google to court because of the invasion of privacy that Street View represents. Likewise, serious privacy issues have been identified in Facebook, Youtube, Flicker, and many other social networking services. In fact, it seems that some of today’s services and products, and many more in future, in order to be good and efficient, will need to invade our privacy! Or this is at least what some pretend. Because of the undeniable added value of many of such products and services, some advocate that we should revisit our perception about privacy and live with the fact that it will be increasingly difficult to maintain privacy as we used to. In other words, we will have to trade our privacy for more features and functionalities, and often, we won’t be given even the choice. Interestingly, a non-negligible portion of scientific community and opinion leaders seem to agree! Well...I don’t. After scarifying QUALITY to get cheap goods, here comes loosing our PRIVACY to get goods. Living in a country which is build around the concepts of quality and privacy, I beg to differ! First of all, technology can be used to reduce, if not to eliminate the dilemma of making a choice between privacy and additional features. It is possible to have the best of the both, if an effort is made to do it. Second, and more importantly, this road will take us to a society where individuals will increasingly disappear in the collective. Trading privacy for services will lead into sharing all thoughts, and inevitably, some other individual values such as ownership. Do you know what a society deprived of privacy, ownership and other individual values is called: THE BORG COLLECTIVE!
Are you ready for assimilation?
This is a mirrored version of my new blog on http://www.ebrahimi.ch
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Visit my new blog on http://www.ebrahimi.ch
I used to be quite a regular blogger for more than two years. I started my first blog on October 20th 2007 (see http://blogs.epfl.ch/touradj.ebrahimi/2007-10-20), and shortly after, on February 2nd, 2008, mirrored it on http://touradjebrahimi.blogspot.com/. Since joining facebook, which takes a good portion of the time I had put aside for my presence on blogosphere, the frequency of my blogs have reduced from once a week to once every 4 months! In fact, my last blog dates back to July 25th, 2009. I have decided to again give it a try and attempt to maintain a blog. This time, I am using Apple’s iWeb and MobileMe which seems to have an efficient user interface, hoping this would save me time, and will allow me to do both my blogging and facebooking in the same length of time I have devoted to such activities. A novelty for this new blog will be that as opposed to my past two blogs (which will continue to mirror this one for a while), I won’t only discuss my work related issues, but also extend to a much wider range of issues. Let’s see how it will go ...
This is a mirrored version of my new blog on http://www.ebrahimi.ch
Saturday, July 25, 2009
QoMEX 2009 is ready to go
It has been quite some time since my last blog. There are many reasons behind this. One is social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I increasingly use these tools to communicate with my colleagues, friends, and all persons with whom I share similar interests. Of course these social networks do not completely replace the need for a blog, but definitely they answer to some of the needs which make people write blogs. And they have features that a blog cannot offer. Obviously, like many others the time I can devote to such activities is limited, and doing one thing more will necessarily leaves less time for something else. But I have not completely given up on blogging and you will see more blogs coming from me, at a slower frequency, but for sure on regular basis.
One other reason which has prevented me to write more blogs is QoMEX 2009. This is a workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience that we founded about a year ago. The preparation of the workshop took a lot of hard work for everybody. I am glad to say that all is now ready for this event to take place next week! We already have nearly 100 confirmed participants, and an exciting program has been put in place. I will certainly write at least one more blog about QoMEX 2009 after it has happened. However, this may take some time. If like me, you are also a member of Fracebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, go to QoMEX 2009 website at http://www.qomex.org and from there find the links to QoMEX at your favorite social network. I strongly recommend that you register to more than only one of these links as each bring a complementary information. For example, Facebook QoMEX contains pictures, video, information, and opinion of participants. Twitter will be used more during the event to allow people to give on the fly their impressions, to send news around about events, papers, sessions, etc., and to share some real-time pictures, and more. LinkedIn is more for discussions before and after the event. Of course somethings can be done in all three. In additon to these, we have also created a presence for QoMEX 2009 on YouTube and DailyMotion with some interesting video already uploaded there. We have planned to record various sessions and presentations at QoMEX 2009 for those speakers who will allow us to do it, and defnitely some of those will find its way on these forums. We are working on a solution to put all the recordings on a site to allow those who could not attend QoMEX 2009 to access them freely, together with the slides of the presentations.
One of the secrets behind the success of social networks is that they live only if the community they are created for becomes active in them. So, please do not hesitate to becomes active in all the above social networks if you have an interest in multimedia and quality of experience. You can use QoMEX presence on these social networks to present yourself and your interests and activities, talk about problems you may have encountered, seek answers for them or present the solutions you may have found that resolve these problems, upload graphics, pictures or video of you or your work, and in short become a member of the community of experts in multimedia and quality of experience.
To end this blog, let me share with you some highlights of QoMEX 2009:
QoMEX’09 features oral presentations, exhibits, panels and poster sessions in order to provide attendees with various channels to exchange and acquire information about the latest developments and future trends in the field of multimedia user experience.
Highlights from the Technical Program:
Plenary Talks
“Innovating the Multimedia Experience”
Speaker: Mr. Dave Blakely, Senior Director, IDEO
“Haptic Design Guidelines and Tools for the Next Generation of User Experience”
Speaker: Dr. Christophe Ramstein, Chief Technology Officer, Immersion Corporation
“Light is a Two-Way Street: The Next 50 Years of Video”
Speaker: Dr. Bruce Flinchbaugh, Texas Instruments Fellow and Director of the Video & Image Processing Laboratory, TI, Dallas
“Comparison of Subjective Assessment Protocols for Digital Cinema Applications”
Speaker: Prof. Christine Fernandez-Maloigne, Professor of Signal and Image Processing in Poitiers University, France
More details about the talks:
http://www.qomex2009.org/PlenaryTalks.asp
Panel on “Quality of Experience: Tools, Targets and Trends”
Panel Chair: Prof. Fernando Pereira, Prof. ECE, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
Panelists:
Prof. Alan Bovik, Prof. and Chair, ECE, UT Austin
Dr. Gary Sulivan, Video Architect, Microsoft and Chairman, ITU/VCEG
Prof. Sebastian Moeller, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and Berlin University of Technology
Dr. Stephen Winkler, Principal Technologist, Symmetricom
More details about the panel
http://www.qomex2009.org/Panel.asp
Technical papers will address the following major areas:
• User Experience Assessment and Enhancement
• Visual User Experience (Image/Video/Graphics)
• Auditory User Experience (Speech/Audio)
• Standardization Activities in Multimedia Quality Evaluation
See here for the list of papers
http://www.qomex2009.org/TechnicalProgram.asp
Registration
To register for the workshop please use this link
https://www.securecms.com/QOMEX2009/Registration.asp
A PDF version of the program guide and further information is available at:
Friday, May 1, 2009
Defense, Security and Sensing 2009
DSS 2009 took place between 13 and 17 April 2009 in Orlando, FL. More information about the event and its various conferences are available at:
http://spie.org/x34810.xml
I had two talks at DSS 2009 this year, both at the Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing, Security, and Applications conference. My first talk was on Next Generation Image Coding Standards: JPEG XR and AIC, was an invited talk. The second was entitled: Multi-view Video Segmentation and Tracking for Video Surveillance.
You can consult the slides of the invited talk below. As the link is sometimes too slow, an alternative way to see these slides would be to go directly to my LinkedIn profile to see these and some other slides I have put there.
At DSS 2009, like in its previous year edition, I had an opportunity to meet Dr. Pankaj Topiwala who is an old timer and very active contributor to DSS. Here, a picture of us.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
JPEG XR AhG meeting in Tokyo, Japan, February 2009
PDF presentation of Dr. Gary Sullivan:
PDF presentation of Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi:
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