Multimedia Signal Processing and Understanding

Mission

The Multimedia Signal Processing and Understanding Lab (MM-Lab) deals with most relevant aspects of multimedia data processing, focusing onto both theoretical and application-driven research issues. Since media can be considered as the technological extensions of human capabilities, particular attention is paid to smart multimedia data management, analysis, transmission and protection, and to those applications where ambient intelligence can provide advanced services beyond human limitations.

Research Areas

The Multimedia Signal Processing and Understanding Group is active in the research areas connected with the whole multimedia content lifecycle, from representation and coding, to processing, storage&retrieval, protection, analysis, and understanding. Major focus is on visual data, and in particular still picture and video. In this field, different fundamental aspects are considered, including: smart representation and transmission of information (adaptive coding, scalability, multiple description coding), middle- and high-level analysis (video object tracking, trajectory analysis and matching, activity and behavior analysis), interactive systems and man-machine interfaces (gesture recognition, eye tracking).

Furthermore, a highly interdisciplinary research area is the semantic retrieval and annotation of multimedia data exploiting content and context of data towards new paradigms for multimedia knowledge management. Finally, different innovative solutions have been developed in the field of multimedia security (data hiding, digital forensics, cryptography) to cope with data protection and copy rights management in different application scenarios. In all research fields we pay particular attention to the theoretical aspects involving higher mathematics but always in an application-oriented approach.

Applications Areas

Research at Multimedia Signal Processing and Understanding Lab always care about real-world applications. The attention to technology transfer is witnessed by several R&D projects developed by the group in the past years, and by the numerous links with local, national and international industries and research centers. At present, three major application areas are targeted. The first scenario concerns ambient awareness technologies for assisted living and e-inclusion. Here, automated monitoring systems are created that allow building applications in the field of videosurveillance, remote presence and domotics. The objective is to use multimedia technologies to acquire a complete knowledge about a monitored environment, and to react to events through automatic functions and advanced user interaction. In this framework, innovative sensing technologies such as wireless video sensors networks are also considered, with particular interest in lightweight coding and processing algorithms to limit computation and battery consumption. Furthermore, distributed processing paradigms are investigated to allow rapid deployment and easy configuration of video-based monitoring tools. Human-computer interaction is another challenging application field, which aims at developing advanced visual interfaces providing natural and intuitive interaction, and removing any technological barrier, which would limit the accessibility to the system and, especially, user acceptance. Specific interfaces have been designed that allow interacting with a system with the simple movement of hands or eyes. Experimental trials are being conducted in collaboration with medical doctors in the framework of rehabilitation and in design of innovative remote controls for elderly and disabled. The third application domain concerns the development of innovative multimedia content-and-context-based search engines. Here, the interaction with the user together with the exploitation of a-priori knowledge are exploited in order to bridge the gap between the current multimedia understanding algorithms and the richness and subjectivity of semantics in human interpretations of multimedia data. Data management includes also activities related to digital rights management and intellectual property preservation, digital content access control and manipulation detection. On the one hand, advanced cryptographic and watermarking techniques allow satisfying the required data security level, while, on the other hand, media content source authentication and image tampering detection can be provided by data hiding and digital forensics.

Highlights

The Multimedia Signal Processing and Understanding Lab is currently exploring highly interdisciplinary initiatives, such as the Application Labs on E-inclusion and E-environment. The goal is to create collaborations among traditionally different research areas and foster new research communities on the boundary of the existing disciplines. In this framework, the has recently founded the Multimedia Geometry Lab, whose aim is to address various geometrical aspects of media engineering, in particular related to information extraction from digital data.

Members

Further Information

Research Program's Technical reports
Research Program's Published papers

The Resaerch Program is member of

• Muovi! (Application Lab)

Projects

Mar 01, 2010		EternalS Trustworthy Eternal Systems via Evolving Software, Data and Knowledge
Dec 09, 2009		PROTOCOL OF INTENTIONS - DSP Tampere Univ. - DISI UnitTN
Dec 01, 2009		GLOCAL Event-based Retrieval of Networked Media
Apr 01, 2009		MOTUS Mobility and Tourism in Urban Scenarios