The implementation of the National Information Infrastructure initiative will require the efficient transmission and storage of voluminous amounts of multimedia traffic, particularly image and video data. This project offers a multidisciplinary attack on this challenging problem with the goal of providing a system-wide optimized solution rather than a possibly mismatched collection of efficient subsystem solutions. It advocates an integration, in both research and education, of relevant aspects of three engineering subfields that have been traditionally treated separately: Signal Processing, Communications, and Networks. The primary educational goals are to help develop interdisciplinary specialists, and to integrate research more heavily into engineering education. This project promotes an adaptive and integrated approach to the algorithmic design and architecture of next-generation visual communications systems for the compression and reliable delivery, over noisy time-varying channels and heterogeneous networks, of images and video. A unifying thread is the use of flexible multiresolution-based frameworks for 1) source coding, 2) channel coding and 3) joint source-channel coding, with the goal of maximizing the delivered image/video quality using fast algorithms. In education, the primary goals are to help develop multidisciplinary specialists, and to integrate research more heavily into both undergraduate and graduate education.
