The course is no longer active, this site refers to the last edition issued (2015-2016). Some links in this page can therefore be no more working.

General info

The course illustrates the models and the software tools for multimedia information (images, audio, video) representation, coding, storage and transmission, and for multimedia systems design and implementation.

How to contact prof. Celentano

Students of past years can contact prof. Celentano by e-mail: auce (at) unive (dot) it

Program

Module 1

1. Introduction. Multimedia and digital communication.
   
   
2. Digital images. Human perception of color. Color models. Data compression. Lossless and lossy compression. Standards for digital image encoding: GIF, PNG, TIFF, JPEG. Discrete cosine transform, JPEG compression, JPEG2000.
   
   
3. Digital audio. Sampling, quantization, signal to noise ratio. Standards for digital audio encoding: WAV, AIFF. Audio compression. Elements of psychoacoustics, critical bands, spatial and temporal masking. Compression: MP3, AAC. The MIDI system.
   
   
4. Digital video. Video color models. Video compression,predictive coding, motion vectors. Standards for digital video encoding: MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H264. HD video.
   
   

Module 2

5. Operating systems issues for continuous media. Synchronization of multimedia data. Quality of service. Real-time scheduling. File systems for continuous media. Real-time network protocols.
   
   
6. Multimedia information systems. Content description. Languages for metadata: RDF, MPEG-7. Digital rights management (DRM), models and standards: MPEG-21.
   
   
7. Multimedia applications design. Multimedia authoring systems. Languages and standards: Flash, Javascript, HTML 5.
   
   
8. Laboratory. The course includes laboratory activity on multimedia data analysis and multimedia application design that will mainly take place in the second term.

Reading list

The reading list includes textbooks (available at the Department's Scientific Library, BAS), scientific papers and other documents available online. The titles referred to as "basic" reading cover the course content at the level required for the assessment. "Advanced" titles cover specific topics in more detail or under different perspectives, and are recommended for a more complete understanding. "Article collections" are books collecting introductory and advanced readings on multimedia systems and technology, and are an ample general reference on the subject.

Most of the suggested titles, excluding textbooks, can be found on-line; sometimes freely in the authors or academic institutions web sites, most often in digital libraries and publishers' sites. They may limit access to particular conditions of subscription or purchase; since Ca' Foscari has entered into a number of subscriptions (please refer to the catalog of on-line resources), much of this material is freely accessible from the University network.

Each scientific paper or document may be provided with one or more links to digital libraries and websites. Links are identified by a label (see a list below), the type of online document (e.g. html, pdf, ps) and the size of the file, if downloadable.

NOTE: As the course is no longer active some of the links to online resources could become invalid in future.

• ACM identifies the ACM Portal with publications (journals and conference proceedings) of the Association of Computer Machinery, freely accessible from the University network.
• CSx identifies the Citeseer^x database, whose referenced content is often available on-line without any access restrictions. The documents are generally pre-print or draft versions or copies stored in personal archives of the authors.
• OA identifies documents published under the Open Access policy, hence available for free access on the publishers' sites.
• On-line identifies documents freely accessible on the web, often in the author Web page or in collections related to other on-line courses.
• Local identifies a local copy of the document in a secured area of the Ca' Foscari Web site; access is granted via username/password provided by the University at student enrollment, and is provided for personal use only in the context of the course.

Basic readings

1. Z. Li, M. Drew and J. Liu. Fundamentals of Multimedia, Pearson Educational, 2014 (chap. 1; chap. 2; chap. 3; chap. 4; chap. 5 except par. 5.1, 5.3; chap. 6 except par. 6.1.9, 6.3.5-6.3.7; chap. 7; chap. 8 except par. 8.4, 8.5.2, 8.6-8.9; chap. 9 except par. 9.3, 9.4; chap. 10; chap. 11; chap. 12; chap. 14; chap. 15 except par. 15.7).

A previous edition currently out of print is also available at the BAS library:
Z. Li, M. Drew. Fundamentals of Multimedia, Pearson Educational, 2004 (chap. 1; chap. 2 except par. 2.3; chap. 3; chap. 4; chap. 5 except par. 5.2; chap. 6 except par. 6.1.9, 6.3.5-6.3.7; chap. 7; chap. 8 except par. 8.4, 8.5.2, 8.6-8.9; chap. 9 except par. 9.3, 9.4; chap. 10; chap. 11; chap. 12; chap. 14; chap. 16 except par. 16.2.6, 116.3, 16.4, 6.5.1, 16.5.2).

2. K. L. Gray, The JPEG2000 Standard, Techniche Universitat Munchen, 2002. [ local pdf 910 Kbyte ]
3. K. Brandenburg. MP3 and AAC explained. AES 17th International Conference on Audio Quality Audio Coding, paper #17-009, 1999. [ on-line pdf 143 KByte ]
4. C. Law, B. Furht. The MPEG-4 Standard for Internet-Based Multimedia Applications. In B. Fuhrt (ed), Handbook of Internet Computing, CRC Press, 2000. [ on-line pdf 389 Kbyte ]
5. R. Steinmetz, K. Nahrstedt. Media and Data Streams. In Multimedia Fundamentals, Volume 1: Media Coding and Content Processing, Prentice Hall, 2002. [ local pdf 143 Kbyte ]
6. T. D. C. Little. Time-based media representation and delivery. In J. F. Koegel Buford (ed), Multimedia systems, ACM Press/Addison-Wesley, 1994. [ local pdf 1.3 Mbyte ]
7. A. Tanenbaum. Multimedia Operating Systems (excerpt). In Modern Operating Systems, 3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 2007. [ local pdf 1.9 Mbyte ]
8. D. James Gemmell, H.M. Vin, D.D. Kandlur, P. Venkat Rangan, L.A. Rowe. Multimedia Storage Servers: a Tutorial, IEEE Computer, 28(5), pp. 40-49, 1995. [ local pdf 910 Kbyte ]
9. D. Hutchison, G. Coulson, A. Campbell, G. S. Blair. Quality of Service Management in Distributed Systems. In M. Sloman (Ed.), Network and distributed systems management, Addison-Wesley, pp. 273-302, 1994. [ CSx pdf 89 Kbyte ]
10. Chunlei Liu. Multimedia Over IP: RSVP, RTP, RTCP, RTSP. Student report, Washington University in St. Louis, 1998. [ on-line html , on-line pdf 90 Kbyte ]
11. Adobe Dynamic Media Group. A Streaming Media Primer. Adobe Systems Inc., 2001. [ on-line pdf 1 Mbyte ]
12. L. Feng, R. Brussee, H.M. Blanken, M. Veenstra. Languages for Metadata. In H.M. Blanken, A.P. de Vries, H.E. Blok, L. Feng (ed.). Multimedia Retrieval, Springer, 2007. [ local pdf 4.4 Mbyte ]
13. P.Koster, W. Jonker. Digital Rights Management. In H.M. Blanken, A.P. de Vries, H.E. Blok, L. Feng (ed.). Multimedia Retrieval, Springer, 2007. [ local pdf 4.1 Mbyte ]

The authors of the book Fundamentals of Multimedia have prepared a set of detailed slides fully covering the book content. They are normally accessible through the instructor's area in the book's website (see the Links section below); a compressed archive is stored in the secured documentation area of the Ca' Foscari web site. [ local zip 7.7 Mbyte ]

A nice and complete presentation of HTML5 made using HTML5 was available on-line, but recently has been removed. An almost complete version can still be found in the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. Since not all browsers are fully compliant with HTML5, some slides might be visualized differently in different browsers. Chrome is recommended.

Advanced readings

1. M. R. Nelson. LZW Data Compression, Dr. Dobb's Journal, 14(10), 1998. [ on-line html ] Available also on the author's blog with comments and code samples [ on-line html ]
2. S. Bernsee. The DFT "à Pied": Mastering The Fourier Transform in One Day, The DSP Dimension, 1999. [ on-line html ]
3. S. A. Khayam. The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT):Theory and Application. Technical Report, Michigan State University, 2003. [ on-line pdf 1.1 Mbyte ]
4. G. K. Wallace. The JPEG Still Picture Compression Standard, Comm. ACM, 34(4), pp. 30-44, 1991. [ ACM pdf 3,29 Mbyte ]
5. C. A. Christopoulos, A. N. Skodras, T. Ebrahimi. The Jpeg2000 Still Image Coding System: an Overview. IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 46(4) pp. 1103-1127, 2000. [ CSx pdf 700 Kbyte ]
6. S. V. Vaseghi. Music Signal Processing and Auditory Perception (excerpt). In Multimedia Signal Processing. Wiley, 2007. [ local pdf 1.1 Mbyte ]
7. S. Meltzer, G. Moser. MPEG-4 HE-AAC v2 - audio coding for today's digital media world. EBU Technical Review, 305, 2006. [ on-line pdf 395 Kbyte ].
8. MIDI Manufacturers Association. Tutorial: MIDI and Music Synthesis, 1995-2001. [ on-line html ]
9. T. Sikora. Digital video coding standards. In R. K. Jurgen (ed), Digital Consumer Electronics Handbook, McGraw-Hill, 1997. [ CSx pdf 1,6 Mbyte ]
10. S. Aramvith and M. Sun. MPEG-1 AND MPEG-2 Video Standards. In A. C. Bovik (ed), Handbook of image and video processing, 2nd ed., Elsevier Academic Press, 2005. [ CSx pdf 160 Kbyte ]
11. R. Koenen (ed). Overview of the MPEG-4 Standard, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 N4668, 2002. [ on-line zipped doc 1,5Mbyte ]
12. VCodex Ltd. Learn about the H.264 standard, 2001-2009 (is a webpage of a consulting Company offering tutorials and other documents on specific issues of the H.264 standard) [ on-line html ]
13. G.J. Sullivan, J. Ohm, H.Woo-Jin,T. Wiegand. Overview of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 22(12), pp. 1649-1668, 2012. [ OA pdf 4.2 Mbyte ]
14. H. Schulzrinne. Operating System Issues for Continuous Media, Multimedia Systems, 4(5), pp. 269-280, 1996. [ CSx pdf 143 Kbyte]
15. B. Sabata, S. Chatterjee, M. Davis, J. J. Sydir, T. F. Lawrence. Taxonomy for QoS Specifications. In Proc. WORDS '97, Object-Oriented Real-Time Dependable Systems, 1997. [ CSx pdf 45 Kbyte ]
16. D. Hillmann. Using Dublin Core. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. [ on-line html ]
17. J. M. Martinez. MPEG-7 Overview (version 10). ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 N6828, 2004. [ online zipped doc3,5 Mbyte ]
18. I. Burnett, R. Van de Walle, K. Hill, J. Bormans, F. Pereira. MPEG-21: goals and achievements. IEEE Multimedia, 10(4), 2003. [ local pdf 696 Kbyte ]

Examples

A collection of application programs, examples and references to web sites relevant to the course topics is also available.

Links

A glossary collects entries to Wikipedia articles relevant to the topics of the course.

The book's web site of Li&Drew Fundamentals of Multimedia contains errata, examples, demo software, teaching material and references to additional online resources.

Last update December 26, 2017.