Video over InternEt and Wireless (VIEW) Technologies Laboratory
(Michael Rung-Tsong Lyu)

The Video over InternEt and Wireless (VIEW) Technologies Laboratory is an R&D centric center organized by three departments (Computer Science and Engineering, Information Engineering, and Systems Engineering and Engineering Management) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The Laboratory focuses on new technologies and applications to support delivery of video over Internet with mobile access capabilities. Three major research areas are 1) video information processing and presentation, 2) wireless and mobile applications development, and 3) augmented reality and digital entertainment.

Video information processing is one of the techniques to cope with video delivery over mobile environment. Information of different channels in the video is extracted and only relevant and important parts are being transmitted to mobile users. Research areas include speech recognition, character recognition, logo recognition, face recognition, video summarization, text summarization, information retrieval, and data visualization techniques.

Developing applications on wireless and mobile environment is a challenging task. The research target is how to author the media data once and can be used on different wireless and mobile platforms. Details research areas include mobile device adaptation model, performance measurements, information representation, and mobile software engineering.

A previous project "A Multilingual Digital Video Content Hub" was supported by Innovation Technology Fund (total funds: $7.8 million) and it aimed at developing techniques for multilingual video content management and delivery over Internet and wireless environment. A prototype called iView was a reference implementation of the proposed open-standard multimedia content hub and exchange frameworks for various applicants. The iView system provides multiple forms of searching capabilities to the users. They can retrieve the information in an easier and faster manner. The system also helps in building the personal video library for families that reduces the tedious video management works significantly. Unlike the traditional video management or indexing system, the i-View system employs the XML technologies to ease the overhead of integrating different searching and indexing functions. Other developers can plug-in their system components easily into the iView system. Besides, the multilingual capabilities of the iView system make it unique to the Hong Kong multilingual cultural environment.

The current project "Augmented Reality Computing Arena for Digital Entertainment (ARCADE)" is also supported by the Innovation Technology Fund (total funds: $4.48 million). The project will develop video object tracking engine (VOTE) as a generic software to track 3D marker and human faces in video contents, so that virtual reality image rendering can be created for entertainment and visualization purposes. Industrial applications for this technology include new entertainment experience for personalized video production, content creation for new generation mobile phones, and augmented reality technology for movie and film production.

Please visit laboratory website http://www.viewtech.org for more information.