Queen Mary, University of London

http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/mmv/index.html

Involvement and Expertise: The Multimedia and Vision Research Lab (MMV) at Queen Mary University of London will provide expertise on designing and implementation of digital media processing including scalable coding, metadata extraction and relevance feedback for media retrieval. Background work will be on the design of efficient systems for accessing media over large databases, scalable video coding, semiautomatic semantic annotation using inference rules and low-level descriptors, data embedding for video and audio copyrighting, metadata extraction and transmission. Two permanent researchers from this research lab will be involved in aceMedia. It is intended to recruit two additional full-time research assistants and two research students. The MMV Lab is led by Dr. E. Izquierdo.

Track Record: The MMV Lab has enjoyed a distinguished reputation for innovation over several years and its academic staff are acknowledged international figures, having won national and international awards. The group has established an international reputation for applying agent multimedia techniques to real world applications, receiving direct funding from oversees, European organisations such as Nokia, Finland, the Department of Defence and the British council. Much of the group's work has been in the context of European Union research projects, such as: ACTS MOMUSYS, Custom TV, SAMBITS, PANORAMA, IMPACT and MARINER; Esprit UNITE; Basic Research DRUMS; IST SHUFFLE and CRUMPET. Within the ACTS project MOMUSYS 1995-9, the group developed a real-time Digital Signal Processor (DSP) implementation of an audio-visual terminal transmitting DECT and UMTS radio interfaces. The group has been involved in a range of communication and multimedia based activities, including the design and implementation of DSP technology for codecs. The group has developed adaptive control systems for the MPEG-4 coding standard. In the IST project SAMBITS 2000-02, work has focused on the development of multimedia technology for off-line and real-time design of new interactive multimedia services containing MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 elements. The group is currently coordinating the IST BUSMAN project and is member of the IST SCHEMA NoE.

The group is also involved in the MPEG-4/7/21 activities. It is an active member of the European COST211 forum in which it has been contributing in important areas in the multimedia domain.