CSE 534 Multimedia Systems Design

Spring 2000

Instructor: Dr. Raj Acharya
Email: acharya@cse.buffalo.edu
Office: 226 Bell Hall
Office Hours: Wed: 2.00 - 3.00 PM

Teaching Assistant: Venkatesh Sarangan

Email: sarangan@cse.buffalo.edu
Office: Trailer A
Office Hours: M, R: 2 - 3 PM; Mon. hours will be in the grad lab.
Class newsgroup: sunyab.cse.534

Course Goals:

This course is an introduction and overview to Multimedia Systems. It will provide an introduction to Multimedia Information Coding and Compression, Video/Image Databases, Multimedia Networks, Traffic Analysis, and Scheduling.

Prerequisites:

This is an advanced course which puts together material from varied fields such as Computer Networks, Information Theory and Image Processing. The student is expected to have taken CSE589 or an equivalent course. Familiarity with OPNET is a necessity for the project work.

Required text: "Multimedia Communications - Protocols & Applications" by Franklin Kuo, Wolfang Efflesberg and J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, PRENTICE HALL, 1998. ISBN 0138569231

Reference text:

Journal, Conference Papers and notes from "Making Copies" will supplement the text book for the course material.

  • The slides for lectures on "Multimedia over the Internet" are available by clicking here .

  • The material on "RSVP" consists of a couple of IEEE Magazine articles which could be accessed by clicking on article1 and article2 .

  • The material for "Mobile Ip" is Charles Perkins' paper listed here .

  • The material for "QoS Routing" is a survey paper listed here .

  • The material for "Distributed QoS routing" is a Journal paper listed here .

    Project 1

    The first project is available here and it shall be discussed in class. The reference paper for the project is here .

    Project 2

    The second project is available here. Please meet Dr. Acharya or the TA if you have any doubts in the project. The references for the project have been made availabe in Making Copies.

    Evaluation

    The evaluation will be based on two programming projects (fairly large), one mid-term, final, small programming assignments and a class presentation. One of the projects will be using OPNET. The students are expected to have a fair knowledge about the package, especially considering the fact that CSE589 is a pre-requisite. For the projects students could work in groups of 2. For the presentations, groups of 4 or 5 would be formed (to be decided later). All the assignments are to be done individually.

    Homeworks

    The first homework is due on Feb 14 and the questions are here . The solutions to the first assignment are here . With special thanks to the student who pointed it out, the answer to the first part in problem 3 is 2Mb and not 4 Mb as the solution says. Please meet the TA if you have any difficulty in understanding the solution.

    The second homework is due on March 2 and the questions are here . The solutions are here and please let the TA know if there are any mistakes in the solution.

    Mid Term

    The mid term questions are here . The exam is due in class on March 20.

    Topics for Presentation

    Suggested topics (but not limited to) for the class presentation are given below. Each presentation will have a duration of 40 mins; Each presentation will be made by a group of 3 students. All the students of a group will be awarded the same points based on the group's presentation. The students should form groups on their own and choose any one of the following topics. Please mail the TA atleast THREE CHOICES in decreasing order of your preference. The topics will be awarded on a FCFS basis. We have around 30 students and hence we have around 10 presentations. The presentations should start on April 10.

    Also note that since we have only 40 minutes for each topic, limit the number of slides (around 25 or so). We are not looking for intricate details; If a group is able to convey what is the crux of their topic, it would be a good work.

    Please contact the TA about 2 days in advance to your talk and give a .ps format of your slides. The students who would be presenting on the given topics and the order in which the presentations will be made are listed below. Please note that the presentations begin on April 10. On April 10, we will have ONLY the first presentation. In the following weeks we will have the subsequent presentations. The groups that have a ? in them should include corresponding number of students.

    1. Mobile RSVP - Yu Liu, Huaming Zhang, Xinwei She - April 10
    2. MPEG 4,7 - Uma Srinivasan, ?, ? - April 17
    3. Videoconferencing and H.32* series - Jeff Dambrowski, Martin Innus, Ram Goverdhana - April 17.
    4. Reliable Multicasting -Xu Dahai, Qi Wang, Xiaojun Ciao - April 17
    5. Differentiated Services - Charutha Apte, Anjali Kulkarni, Yianchen - April 24
    6. Wireless TCP - Swastik Bihani, and Pooja Agarwal, Weijun Ma - April 24
    7. Image Retrieval Techniques - Ashish Garg, Tanusree Dutta, Sambit Bhattacharya - April 24
    8. Mobile IP Extensions - Narayan Menon, Jayesh Shukla, Varun Lalchandani - May 1
    9. RTSP, SIP - Li He, Xiaofen Ou, Yong Ji - May 1
    10. Multicast Routing Protocols - Vivek Pai, Tamanna Sait, Amit Bhri - May 1
    If you are interested in presenting any other topic, please meet the TA or Prof. Acharya.

    Course Contents

    The material for the course could broadly be classified into two categories, Video/Image Databases and Multimedia Networks . Topics covered under Video/Image databases would be
    • Basics of Image/Video
    • Fourier Transform, DCT, and Wavelets
    • Basics of Information Theory
    • Image/Video Representation - JPEG, MPEG, etc.
    • Multimedia Information Retrieval

    Under Multimedia networks, we would primarily deal with the Internet and ways of transmitting real-time data through it. We would not deal with ATM and the like as these are dealt in detail in other courses. The topics to be discussed are most likely to be:

    • Basics of Internet
    • Multicasting
    • Mobile IP
    • Integrated Services - RSVP
    • RTP, RTCP
    • QoS Routing
    • Scheduling, Queueing disciplines and Discarding Policies
    • Traffic Modeling for the WWW
    The lectures will be used to introduce the above topics to the students; Some of them like RSVP, Traffic modeling etc. will be covered in certain depth. To cover the above topics in nitty-gritty detail would be difficult, students will be assigned specific topics from the above list for their presentation.

    Academic Integrity

    The department has not witnessed any cases of plagiarism in the past and hopes that the trend continues in the future too. The departmental policy on Academic Integrity is reproduced below for your convenience:

    As a good rule of thumb, you may discuss any problem in the course as long as no one is using a writing implement (computers included) nor looking at any source code for the assignment. That is, any group work must be verbal only. Obviously you may look at the textbook or class handouts/class notes together. One exception to this rule is that when a friend is having trouble with a small bug, and you notice a typo or other "silly little mistake", you may point it out to them. More substantive assistance is definitely not allowed, from any source whatsoever, including tutors or friends not enrolled in the course. The professor or teaching assistants will be able to give more help if you are stuck with concepts.

    All academic work must be your own. Collaboration, usually evidenced by unjustifiable similarity in assignments, is never allowed. After an appropriate informal review, if any students are found in violation of maintaining academic integrity, sanctions will be imposed, which can be as severe as receiving an F in the course. Especially flagrant violations will be considered under formal review proceedings, which can call for harsher sanctions including expulsion from the University. If you ever have any questions or concerns regarding the policy, particularly as it relates to this course, see your instructor.