A manifesto on the future of image coding - JPEG Pleno

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.

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

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

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

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:

http://www.qomex.org

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.

JPEG XR AhG meeting in Tokyo, Japan, February 2009

PDF presentation of Dr. Gary Sullivan:

https://documents.epfl.ch/users/e/eb/ebrahimi/www/JPEGXR-TOKYO/Gary.pdf

PDF presentation of Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi:

https://documents.epfl.ch/users/e/eb/ebrahimi/www/JPEGXR-TOKYO/Touradj.pdf

87th MPEG meeting at EPFL in February 2009

The 87th MPEG meeting took place at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, from February 1st to 6th, 2009. This was the 7th time MPEG committee was coming to Switzerland at the invitation of the Swiss National Body to ISO, and the third time the committee came to EPFL. This meeting was very productive with many exciting developments. Among others, one can mention activities around 3D video coding, and the newly launched High Performance Video Coding, referred to as HVC, which aims at creating the next generation video compression algorithms beyond Advanced Video Compression AVC (also known as MPEG-4 part 10 and H.264). Another highlight of the meeting was the announcement that MPEG committee has received two Emmy Awards thanks to its outstanding contributions with AVC.

Some pictures of the meeting can be consulted at the following URL:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/SwissMPEG2009?feat=directlink

VPQM2009

The forth edition of international workshop on video processing and quality metrics for consumer electronics (VPQM) took place in Scottsdale, Arizona, on January 15 and 16, 2009. This event has now become a traditional gathering place for experts from around the world active in the field of video quality assessment. More details about the forth edition, and previous workshops, together with program and papers presented are available at the following url:

http://enpub.fulton.asu.edu/resp/vpqm/

During this workshop I presented a work we did jointly with FUB on the influence of color information in the perception of quality in high resolution pictures. The pdf version of the paper can be accessed at the end of this article on its EPFL mirror.

I took a few pictures while at VPQM, that you can consult here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/VPQM2009?feat=directlink

It is worth mentionning that I am organizing a workshop related to this topic in San Diego from July 29-31st, 2009, called QoMEX.

Have a look at the following url and consider submitting a contribution:

http://www.qomex.org

MMSPG 2008 Christmas dinner

The now traditional MMSPG 2008 Christmas dinner took place on Saturday December 13th, 2008, at the usual place: Relais de la Poste, a nice restaurant on the easterns hights of Lausanne, in the middle of vineyards. This was a joyful and friendly gathering to meet with colleagues and their family members, and to celebrate a rather dynamic year 2008. Some photos of the dinner can be found at the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MMSPG2008ChristmasDinner?feat=directlink

9th MMSPG lunch meeting in 2008

The 9th, and probably last lunch meeting of our research group in 2008, took place on November 7th. This lunch was organized by Jong-Seok LEE. Thanks to his wife's kind efforts and contributions, we could all enjoy some interesting and very tasty Korean food and drinks. Our appreciations go to both of them, and we look forward to have another similar experience very soon.

There are some pictures in the following URL of the event, and especially a few snapshots of some of the food we had:

picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/9thMMSPGLunchMeetingIn2008#

Eighth MMSPL lunch meeting

The Eighth lunch meeting in 2008, and the first after the summer break, took place on 22nd September 2008. This lunch was organized by Daniele Ticca one week before he ends his stay with us. Unsurprizingly, on he menu, we had Pizza! We wish Daniele good luck in his future career and will always remember his stay and the good memories he left with us.

Some photos of the lunch are available at:

picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/EighthMMSPLLunchMeeting#

K-Space meeting in Lausanne

K-space is an EC funded Network of Excellence on Knowledge Space of Semantic Inference for Automatic Annotation and Retrieval of Multimedia Content. This consortium has been running since January 2006 and is currently in its third and last year of conducting business. More information about K-space can be found at the following website: http://www.k-space.eu/

On September 22 and 23, 2008, the General Meeting of K-space was organized by my research team at EPFL, where more than 40 attended. A few pictures of the event can be found at the following site:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/KSpaceMeetingInLausanne#

Petamedia SIG1 meeting at EPFL

Petamedia Special Interest Group 1 (SIG1) on content distribution took place at EPFL on Friday September 19th, 2008. Petamedia is a network of excellence funded by the European Commission on Peer to Peer Tagged Media. I have already written other articles about this NoE on this blog, and refer interested readers to those articles. Let me just say that more information about this NoE can be found at the following url:

http://www.petamedia.eu/

The main objective of SIG1 was to have an indepth understanding of acticvities of all groups involved in content distribution related topics, and to define a detailed program to collaborate with each other.

I believe this goal was achieved with success and a mini-project was defined between most of the partners present to work together on the problem of video streaming over a peer to peer network. Other achievements of the meeting were organization of a tutorial for all partners to better understand issues and trends in peer to peer networks, and to define a longer term road map to explore avenues beyond the mini-project that has been set up.

A few pictures of the meeting are available at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/PetamediaSIG1meetingEPFL#

IM2 and Affective Sciences NCCRs Summer Institute 2008

IM2 and Affective Sciences Summer Institute took place in Riederalp from 1-3 September 2008. IM2 is a Swiss National Center of Competence on Research in the field of Interactive Multimodal Information Management. I have been the deputy director of IM2 since 2006. Affective Sciences is another Swiss National Center of Competence on Reseach interested in understanding how emotions affect the way individuals and societies behave. Riederalp is a village in Valais Canton of Switzerland not very far from the world famous Aletsch glacier. This summer institute was organized to explore common interests between these two NCCRs and to set the ground for stronger collaborations between groups and individuals involved in each. To do so, after a short presentation of each NCCR, a GEKO (Get to Know each Other) session was organized followed by parallel sessions with presentations and workshops around themes of common interest. Finally a poster session was an opportunity for many of the researchers to present their research activities in more details. I acted at the moderator of the GEKO, and three of my research team members attended this summer institute (Francesca de Simone, Jong-Seok Lee, and Ashkan Yazdani). The program of the summer institute, and the slides of the presentations are accessible from the following url:

http://www.im2.ch/summer-institute-2008

In the above site you will also find a lot of pictures. But I also took some of mine, that can be seen at the following link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/IM2AffectiveScienceSummerInstitute2008#

SPIE Optics and Photonics 2008

The annual SPIE meeting Optics and Photonics took place from 10-14 August 2008 in San Diego. Optics and Photonics is a huge symposium composed of several conferences. The conference Appications of Digital Image Processing is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) conferences in image processing. It has been founded and is chaired by Andy Tescher a well-known researcher in the field. This year, Andy asked me to be the acting chair of the conference due to some other committments he had. The conference was very intresting with a lot of first time presentations in some of the most recent advances in image processing. Among others I would like to mention JPEG-XR which is a new standard for image compression. I took a few pictures during the conference that can be consulted from the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/SPIEOpticsAndPhotonics2008#

The link to Optics and Photonics 2008 program is somehow unavailable at the time of the writing of this article. But the best way to find out about the program would be to go to SPIE website at http://www.spie.org and then look for past conferences. I may update this article with the exact url, if SPIE updates its website at some point in future.

MPEG meeting in Hannover, Germany

The 85th MPEG meeting took place in Hannover between 21st and 25th July 2008. This meeting was colocated with the Joint Video Team (JVT) which is a group composed of experts from both ISO/IEC and ITU-T, active in standardization of Advanced Video Coding (AVC) also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 and H.264. Many developments took place during that week. A highlight of the meeting can be accessed at the end of the mirror article of this blog at my EPFL site (see the links on the left side). Beside progress in Multiview Video Coding (MVC), a well attended meeting discussed requirements, applications and needs for standardization of potential future video compression standards. The MPEG meeting was followed by an SC29 meeting in Hannover. SC29 is the board overseeing the activities of both JPEG and MPEG standards.

I took a few pictures of both events that can be consulted at the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MPEGMeetingHannoverJuly2009

JPEG meeting in Poitiers, France

JPEG committee met in Poitiers, France, from July 7th to 11th 2008. This was the second time in the same year some of the JPEG committee members were coming to this city. In fact, a meeting of the Ad Hoc Group on JPEG XR evaluation also took place there a few months earlier, about which I already reported in my blog. This meeting was an occasion to progress with quite a few items. JPEG XR reached Final Committee Draft status and has been sent out for ballot by ISO National Bodies. JPEG XR is also going to extend its scope with new parts to take into account things such as moving pictures. Another important issue was the creation of a new work item for standardization called Advanced Image Coding (AIC). AIC has been an exploratory activity in the last few years within JPEG committee and it was felt that it was now time to officially start work on it towards standardization. The first milestone in AIC will be a set of metrics for both subjective and objective evaluation methodologies and metrics for still image compression. This will then follow by standardization of new algorithms for image compression beyond those already developped or under development in JPEG. JPSearch also progressed well in Poitiers. JPSearch is a standard for annotation, management, search and retrieval of still images. The press release of the JPEG committee which was issued as the outcome of the Poitiers meeting can be accessed from the EPFL mirror of this blog (http://blogs.epfl.ch/touradj.ebrahimi).

I also took a few pictures accessible from:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/JPEGmeetingPoitiersJuly2008

Montreux Jazz Festival 2008

This year saw another very successful edition of the world famous Montreux Jazz Festival. The 42nd festival took place between 4th and 19th July 2008, and lined up a unique collection of artists. Since more than one year, I have been closely involved in an exciting project at EPFL which aims at archiving the recordings of the Montreux Jazz Festivals and to enrich and enhance them to the fullest extent. I will certainly write another article in this blog descrbing more in details the aims of that project. But here, let me just refer you to the url of the Montreux Jazz Festival at:

http://www.montreuxjazz.com/news/index_en.aspx

I attended a few days and nights of the festival with some of my colleagues, combining work with fun. Some pictures can be consulted at the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MontreuxJazzFestival2008

COST 292 WG7 Technical Meeting in Florence

I have already written about COST 292 in this blog. I refer you to past articles for more information about COST 292 or directly to the website of this Action at:
http://www.cost292.org
The Technical Committee WG7 of COST 292 met in Florence on June 30th 2008. This was the forth time we were meeting in Florence at the kind invitation of Fratelli Alinari. Some pictures of the meeting can be consulted at the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/COST292WG7TechnicalMeetingInFlorence