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#