Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

At present, there exists no interactive system that enables the viewer to interact with the television content by exerting control over the contents of the program being viewed. Our aim is to conduct research that leads to complete end-to-end design of an interactive digital television system which offeres DVD-like interactivity.Our proposal involves a cross fertilization of innovative ideas in multimedia, video processing and statistical signal processing. Novel aspects include:(i) Developing practical encoding, authoring and multiplexing schemes at the broadcasting side. These include scalable video coding methods, real-time DVD-like authoring and formatting tools for interactive content, and new multiplexing schemes.(ii) Developing experimentally validated stochastic dynamical traffic models for interactive TV content. New admission, scheduling and traffic characterization techniques that exploit channel conditions and optimize network performance will be designed.(iii) Developing demultiplexing, buffering, caching and playback schemes for the receiver-end. Our goal is to use the existing DVD architecture and modify it to handle our proposed interactive services.The research will contribute to significant advances in real-time efficient bandwidth utilization, efficent characterization of video traffic and scheduling, interactive real-time architectures, and real-time DVD-like authoring tools. Our novel interactive TV design will be of significant interest to content providers(Hollywood), broadcasters and entertainment device manufacturers, since it does not introduce significant changes to the receiving end.