Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proposed research program is comprised of the following two research projects: 1. Reconfigurable Computing Design Methodologies with Application to Hybrid Video Codec. The reconfigurable computing is able to re-write itself into different architectures in order to meet specific application and performance requirements. It provides an excellent platform to build system on chips (SoC) that require higher performance, low power dissipation and at the same time a high degree of programmability. In this research, we will investigate the design strategies and methodologies for reconfigurable computing and apply them to design reconfigurable architectures for hybrid video codec that is able to encode (decode) a video into (from) multiple formats according to different video compression standards (MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and H.264). The study will be conducted at three different levels: algorithm and process analysis at system design level, hardware-software co-design at the architecture level, and reconfigurable circuit design at the logic circuit level. 2. Multilayer Access Control Modeling for MPEG-7 Multimedia Applications. A multimedia document in a digital library could be huge and may contain private, sensitive or other restrictive information. A user may allow to access certain part(s) of the document depending access rights and needs. We will develop a generic multilayer access control model for various MPEG-7 multimedia applications including digital libraries, e-education, and multimedia entertainment such that the same model can be integrated by all existing access control systems. The proposed model will integrate with major features of the MPEG-7 standard to achieve efficient and effective secure multilayer access control.