Multimedia Applications, Services and Techniques - ECMAST'99 4th European Conference, Madrid, Spain, May 26-28, 1999, Proceedings

The liberalisation in the telecommunication market and thus the advent of competition has had a tremendous impact on business in this area. New operators have started to offer telecommunication services in competition with the classical national network operators. This in turn will have an impact on the market share, the tariff structure, the Quality of Service (QoS) and the services offered to the end customers. A way to maintain or increase revenue for network operators is to additionally offer new services to the customers. The final target is a so-called "Full Service Network (FSN)", which is capable of offering all types of bi-directional multimedia services. The provisioning of new telecommunication services in general and new multimedia services in particular is made possible by the availability of several new technologies as well as through advances in standardisation. R&D policies world-wide but especially in Europe have forced the development of new networking technologies such as ATM, xDSL and HFC as well as new video technologies as defined by DVB and DAVIC.

Services & Applications.- The SICMA Teleteaching Trial on ADSL and Intranet networks.- Usability Assessment of Collaborative Shared-Space Telepresence Shopping Services.- Risk Methodology for Multimedia Projects Assessments.- Multimedia Terminals.- Efficient End-Host Resource Management with Kernel Optimizations for Multimedia Applications.- SOMMIT Project: Enabling New Services for the Next Generation of Digital TV Receivers.- Content Creation.- An Approach for Script-Based Broadcast Application Production.- The ATLANTIC Audio Demonstration System.- Object-Based Motion Parameterization Using Shape Adaptive Bilinear Warping.- MPEG-4 PC — Authoring and Playing of MPEG-4 Content for Local and Broadcast Applications.- Physical Broadcast Infrastructure.- Single Frequency Networks for Digital Video Broadcasting.- The Return Channel in Collective Installations.- Feasibility Model Implementation and Evaluation of an HFC S-CDMA Broadband Return Channel Concept.- Analysis of a Multiple Service MAC Layer For Two-Way Two-Layer LMDS Networks.- Multimedia Over The Internet — Part I.- Integrating MPEG-4 into the Internet.- New Services on an Advanced Internet.- Adaptive Video on Demand Service on RSVP Capable Network.- An Engineering Approach to QoS Provisioning over the Internet.- Multimedia Over The Internet — Part II.- A Charging Model for Sessions on the Internet.- COMIQS System for Commercial Presentations on the Internet.- The CATI Project: Charging and Accounting Technology for the Internet.- Metadata.- A Conceptual Framework to Support Content-Based Multimedia Applications.- High Level Description of Video Surveillance Sequences.- Enabling Flexible Services Using XML Metadata.- 3D Imaging.- VIDAS Analysis/Synthesis Tools for Natural-to-Virtual Face Representation.- Face Location and Recognition for Video Indexing in the Hypermedia Project.- Object Articulation Based on Local 3D Motion Estimation.- Three Dimensional Model Adaptation and Tracking of a Human Face.- Multicast Protocols.- H.323 Videoconference over Native ATM.- Some Design Issues of SRMTP, a Scalable Reliable Multicast Transport Protocol.- A Multicast Gateway for Dial-In Lines.- Security & Protection.- Fast Multimedia Encryption in JAVA.- Watermarking in the MPEG-4 Context.- Protecting Intellectual Proprietary Rights through Secure Interactive Contract Negotiation.- Mobility.- Multimedia Dialogue Management in Agent-Based Open Service Environments.- MEMO: The Specification of a Hybrid System for Interactive Broadcast and Internet Access using DAB and GSM.- A Mobile Middleware Component Providing Voice Over IP Services to Mobile Users.- Introducing Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting Services.