[PDF of presentation available as attachment at the bottom of this page]

Although the imminent death of research into video compression has often been proclaimed, the growth in capacity of telecommunications networks is being outpaced by the rapidly increasing demand for services. The result is an ongoing need for better multimedia compression, and particularly video and image compression. At the same time, there is a need for these services to be carried on networks of greatly varying capacities and qualities of service, and to be decoded by devices ranging from small, low-power, handheld terminals to much more capable fixed systems. Hence, the ideal video compression algorithm have high compression efficiency, be scalable to accommodate variations in network performance including capacity and quality of service, and be scalable to accommodate variations in decoder capability. In this presentation, these issues will be examined, illustrated by recent research at UNSW@ADFA in compression efficiency, scalability and error resilience.

About Michael Frater
Dr Michael Frater is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering, University of New South Wales, at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He holds a Bachelors degree in electrical engineering, a Masters in Higher Education and a Doctor of Philosophy in systems engineering. In 1995, he held the position of Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, Institute of Computer Science, University of Wuerzburg, Germany. His research interests include communications systems and services, including communications architectures, video conferencing and video and image surveillance. He has managed a number of collaborative development projects in image and video communications. He has been actively involved in the development of international standards for audio-visual communications and has chaired the group within the Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG) concerned with wireless and mobile applications of this technology. He has also been an editor of an MPEG standard. He is the author or co-author of six books and over one hundred technical articles.