Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language

In this paper, we present the design and development of a real-time interactive virtual classroom multimedia distance learning system at the University of Washington. There has been rapid progress in digital media compression research, and the delivery of media data on the public Internet is becoming widespread. A real-time interactive virtual classroom allows a remote participant to not only receive a live class feed, but also to interact in a live class by asking questions with audio, video in real-time using an Internet connection. Many instructors use electronically prepared slides during their class. The traditional video coding algorithms are not able to compress this slide data very well at low bit-rate. We propose a web-based real-time presentation system for the electronic slides. Instructors also write text on a white board or a piece of paper during the class. At low bit-rate, the conventional video encoding algorithms cannot encode this handwritten text video with enough fidelity, resulting in an illegible decoded video. We propose an extension of the well known bilevel image encoding algorithms to handle the handwritten text video. Our method results in decoded video frames which can be read very clearly when encoded at low bit-rate. We have developed a set of tools which allows recording the live classroom session and automatic creation of a synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL) presentation, which can be used for a later viewing.

The demand for and expectation of ubiquitous access to multimedia online learning resources are much higher amongst computer science students than other fields of study. Previous systems providing internet access to digital video or audio recordings of lectures have been disappointing or ineffective as a learning experience or excessively complex and time-consuming from the educator's point of view. This paper describes a new approach to building an online presentation archive of lectures, based on a relatively new Recommendation from W3C called SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) . It describes a highly efficient and integrated system for capturing, indexing, searching and delivering online presentations without relying upon proprietary technology.

In this paper, we present the design and development of a real-time interactive virtual classroom multimedia distance learning system at the University of Washington. There has been rapid progress in digital media compression research, and the delivery of media data on the public Internet is becoming widespread. A real-time interactive virtual classroom allows a remote participant to not only receive a live class feed, but also to interact in a live class by asking questions with audio, video in real-time using an Internet connection. Many instructors use electronically prepared slides during their class. The traditional video coding algorithms are not able to compress this slide data very well at low bit-rate. We propose a web-based real-time presentation system for the electronic slides. Instructors also write text on a white board or a piece of paper during the class. At low bit-rate, the conventional video encoding algorithms cannot encode this handwritten text video with enough fidelity, resulting in an illegible decoded video. We propose an extension of the well known bilevel image encoding algorithms to handle the handwritten text video. Our method results in decoded video frames which can be read very clearly when encoded at low bit-rate. We have developed a set of tools which allows recording the live classroom session and automatic creation of a synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL) presentation, which can be used for a later viewing. Index Terms-Distance learning, JBIG video, multicast, video-on-demand, virtual classroom. I. INTRODUCTION T HE ultimate goal of a real-time distance learning system is to provide the remote participant with most of the capabilities and experiences that an in-class participant receives. There has been rapid progress in digital media compression research. Starting with MPEG1 [1] and MPEG2 [2] at the higher bit-rate range (Mb/s) to H.261 [3] (64 Kb/s) and H.263(+) [4] (Kb/s) at the low bit-rate range, digital video coding standards can achieve a bit-rate and quality suitable for the various network bandwidths in the current heterogeneous networking environments. The MPEG4 [5] video coding standard is currently being formalized and aims at providing content-based access along with the compression. In the digital audio/speech coding, MPEG, GSM [6], and G.723.1 [7] are among the state-of-the-art coding standards.

The W3C working group on synchronized multimedia has developed a language for Web-based Multimedia presentations called SMIL: the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. This paper presents GRiNS, an authoring and presentation environment that can be used to create SMIL-compliant documents and to play SMIL documents created with GRiNS or by hand.

Creating compelling multimedia productions is a non-trivial problem. This is true for both professional and personal content. For professional content, extensive production support is typically available during creation. Content assets are well structured, content fragments are professionally produced with high quality, and production assets are often highly annotated (within the scope of the production model). For personal content, nearly none of these conditions exist: content is a collection of assets that are structured only by linear recording time, of mediocre technical quality (on an absolute scale), and with only basic automatic annotations. These conditions limit the options open to casual authors and to viewers of rich multimedia content in creating and receiving focused, highly personal media presentations. The problem is compounded when authors want to integrate community media assets: media fragments donated from a potentially wide and anonymous recording community. In this thesis we reflect on the traditional multimedia authoring workflow and we argue that a fresh new look is required. Our experimental methodology aims at meeting the requirements needed for social communities that are not addressed by traditional authoring and sharing applications. We focus on the particular task of supporting socially-aware multimedia authoring, in which the relationships within particular social groups can be exploited to create highly personal media experiences. Our framework is centered on empowering users in telling stories and commenting on personal media artifacts, considering the long-term social context of the user. The work has been evaluated through a number of prototype tools that allow users to explore, create, enrich and share rich multimedia artifacts. Results from our evaluation process provide useful insights into how a socially-aware multimedia authoring and sharing system should be designed and architected, for helping users in recalling personal memories and in nurturing their close circle relationships.

The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) [Aya01] is an W3C [W3C03] specification for authoring multimedia documents. Although SMIL has XML like syntactic constructs, unlike XML, SMIL compositions have an intended semantics stemming from intuitive notions of playing out many media streams relative to each other. Although there are many excellent models for XML access control [DdVPS00, DdVPS02, BCF01, BCFM00, SF02, KH00, GB02, KW02, GF03], they do not respect the intended meaning of multimedia constructs. To remedy this, we propose a model for controlling accesses to SMIL documents by decorating them with appropriate RDF statements that respect these semantics. Using this model, we show how such documents can be fetched by secure runtimes from secure multimedia servers.

This paper presents a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) prototype tool called ACTS (Annotation Collaboration Tool via SMIL -Synchronized Multimedia Integrated Language), which was designed to meet the user requirements of a distributed, collaborative team performing remote analysis of robotic welds. Based on open standards such as W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) SMIL, ACTS provides a framework of temporal and spatial synchronization for multimedia data streams. An annotation facility provides for asynchronous collaboration among colleagues. ACTS uses the NISTdeveloped S2M2 [2] Java applet-based SMIL player that implements and extends the SMIL 1.0 specification. Future work is also discussed.

This paper describes the process and particular support tools for authoring reusable web-based multimedia presentations. These tools enable authors to record and encode streams of audio and video, and to integrate into them additional multimedia material, such as PowerPoint slides. The paper also describes the W3C synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL) standard that enables the interlinking of audio/video with additional material. Finally, the paper introduces an easy-to-use authoring tool, developed and used by the author's faculty to produce multimedia information packages, and their corresponding user interface.

According to the increasing interests of healthcare and medical information services for healthy living, the multimedia authoring tools for healthcare and medical contents are strongly required. In this paper, a new multimedia authoring tool supporting user-friendly interfaces is implemented, which is based on SMIL (synchronized multimedia integration language) producing Web-based multimedia contents. The implemented authoring tool in this paper not

The advances in computer and graphic technologies have led to the popular use of multimedia for information exchange. However, multimedia systems are difficult to test. A major reason is that these systems generally exhibit fuzziness in their temporal behaviors. The fuzziness is caused by the existence of non-deterministic factors in their runtime environments, such as system load and network traffic. It complicates the analysis of test results. The problem is aggravated when a test involves the synchronization of different multimedia streams as well as variations in system loading. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on the testing and fault-identification of multimedia systems by treating the issue as a classification problem. Typical classification techniques, including Bayesian networks, knearest neighbor, and neural networks, are experimented with the use of X-Smiles, an open source multimedia authoring tool supporting the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). The encouraging result of our study, which is based only on five attributes, shows that our proposal can achieve an accuracy of 57.6 to 79.2% in identifying the types of fault in environments where common cause variations are present. A further improvement of *

The work of the Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group (OHSWG) has lead to the creation of several hypermedia models and a common protocol for Navigational Hypertext. However none of these include a working model of context. In this paper we present how we have extended the Fundamental Open Hypermedia Model (FOHM) to include context and behaviour. We then present Auld Leaky, a lightweight contextual link server that stores and serves structures represented in FOHM, using Context to filter query results.