The revolution of Multimedia

We are currently witnessing a revolution in the field of multimedia communications. The Internet and its leading application, the Web, are providing a distribution network for vast quantities of stored multimedia information, including audio, video, animation, and virtual reality media. These revolutionary changes call for new developments in multimedia compression, processing and copyright protection. Additionally, there is great interest in providing new user interfaces that will be better adapted to audio and video interaction with digital devices.

Our research themes

The Multimedia Communications Department is actively involved in a number of research projects that study fundamental technologies to improve the processing and usage of multimedia information. These research projects are organized along the following themes :

• Indexing of stored multimedia information, which aims at improving the search and retrieval of multimedia information, and multimedia filtering, which can be used to automatically direct multimedia information to the right users ;

•  Acoustic processing and speech recognition, which facilitate communication from user to computer, and from user to other users ;  

• Virtual reality imaging, which aims at creating virtual meeting rooms, and watermarking of images and video, which can ensure effective copyrighting of image and videos.