General Info

Multimedia Lab (MMLab) is a research group within Ghent University (Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Department of Electronics and Information Systems). MMLab was founded in 2001. This lab has a wide range of activities, including fundamental/basic research, applied research, and contract-based research with industrial partners. Besides, MMLab is doing scientific consultancy for both industrial and governmental partners and is one of the founding research groups of IBBT.

 

Main research Topics

The main research topics that are dealt with by MMLab can be summarized as follows:

  • Video coding and compression
    • profound expertise in recent video coding standards such as MPEG-4, H.264/AVC, Scalable Video Coding (SVC)
    • advanced video coding techniques for higher compression and/or lower complexity ('H.265')
    • distributed video coding (DVC)
    • objective/subjective assessment of coding efficiency (video quality)
    • error resilience and error concealment
  • Image/video processing and analysis
    • texture detection and classification (content-based retrieval)
    • shot detection in the compressed domain
    • moving object and event detection in the compressed domain for video surveillance
    • multi-camera video surveillance (e.g., smoke tracking for fire evolution forecasting)
  • Multimedia content adaptation
    • adaptation of multimedia resources to meet constraints of the usage environment (network, device, ...)
    • low-complexity compressed-domain video transcoding (H.264/AVC to H.264/AVC, H.264/AVC to SVC)
    • format-agnostic description-driven and semantic content adaptation (guided by XML/RDF resource descriptions)
  • Metadata technology
    • metadata models for file-based (tapeless) TV production including support for all related engineering processes (e.g., full proof-of-concept for drama & news production)
    • metadata models for archiving, exchange, and dissemination of multimedia (meta)data
    • ontology engineering enabling semantic reasoning on multimedia data (e.g. generic multimedia ontology and annotation of multimedia)
  • Gaming technology
    • parallelization using GPGPU (GPU-assisted video processing and parallelization of video coding/processing algorithms)
    • 3-D visualisation & real-time rendering technology (texture compression for 3-D rendering)
    • game technology (innovative input technology and optimization of production pipelines)
  • Standardization in the domain of multimedia applications and systems
    • VCEG / JVT: contribution to H.264/AVC-based compression tools
    • W3C: co-chair of the 'media fragments' working group, participation in the 'media annotation' working group and the 'multimedia semantics' incubator
    • MPEG: (co-)editor of multiple MPEG-21 standards
    • VQEG: validating video quality metrics

The activities of MMLab in basic/fundamental research (e.g., development of new algorithms for multimedia coding/decoding) are at the basis of other, rather application-driven, research activities (e.g., exploitation of scalable video compression in iDTV applications).