Recent years have seen a number of significant advances in source compression for images, video and other high dimensional media. These include content-adaptive oriented bases to follow motion or geometric flow; efficient schemes for representing motion and other complex structural properties; and distributed video coding. While compression efficiency and visual fidelity are important driving forces behind some of these innovations, an arguably even more important motivator is the need for flexible representations and systems. The goal is to allow decisions regarding quality, bandwidth, display resolution, region of interest or computational requirements to be moved away from the source compressor itself and placed in more dynamic components of the system such as servers, interactive clients, network transcoders and the like. The first part of this talk provides a review of some of these topics, highlighting approaches which have proven effective to date and areas where we can expect to see further gains. In the second part of the talk, we suggest future directions for multimedia compression and distribution. We consider the roles played by source compression, intelligent servers and intelligent clients in addressing the needs of diverse, interactive clients, browsing large, potentially open ended multimedia content sources.

About David Taubman
David Taubman is with the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, at the University of New South Wales, where he heads the Telecommunications Research Group. Before joining UNSW at the end of 1998, he spent 4 years at Hewlett-Packard's research laboratories in Palo Alto, California. He received the B.S. and B.E. (Electrical) degrees in 1986 and 1988 from the University of Sydney, Australia, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1992 and 1994 from the University of California at Berkeley. He contributed extensively to the JPEG2000 standard for image compression and the JPIP standard for interactive image communication. He is author, with Michael Marcellin, of the book "JPEG2000: Image compression fundamentals, standards and practice" and author of the popular Kakadu software for JPEG2000 developers. He is recipient of two IEEE Best Paper awards: for the 1996 paper, "A Common Framework for Rate and Distortion Based Scaling of Highly Scalable Compressed Video;" and for the 2000 paper, "High Performance Scalable Image Compression with EBCOT". He is also co-author with J. Thie of a 2004 ICIP best student paper award, for work on hybrid ARQ with LR-PET. He was also invited plenary speaker at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in October 2006. His research interests include scalable image and video compression, joint source/channel coding, multimedia distribution, perceptual modeling and inverse problems in imaging.