A distributed video-on-demand (VoD) system is one where collection of video data is located at dispersed sites across a computer network. In a single site environment, a local video server retrieves video data from its local storage device. However, in the setting of a distributed VoD system, when a customer requests a movie from the local server, the server may need to interact with other servers located across the network. In this paper, we present three types of presentation plans that a local server must construct in order to satisfy the customer request. Informally speaking, a presentation plan is a temporally synchronized detailed sequence of steps that the local server must perform for presenting the requested movie to the customer. This involves obtaining commitments from other video servers, obtaining commitments from the network service provider, as well as making commitments of local resources, within the limitations of available bandwidth, available buffer, and customer data consumption rates. Furthermore, for evaluating the goodness of a presentation plan, we introduce two measures of optimality for presentation plans: minimizing wait time for a customer, and minimizing access bandwidth is used. We develop algorithms to compute optimal presentation plans for all three types, and carry out extensive experiments to compare their performance. We have also mathematically proved certain results for the presentation plans that had previously been verified experimentally in the literature.

The goal of this research is to develop a Remote Medical Examination System on Oriental Medicine on the very high sped information communication network. We developed a remote medical examination system based on the sample examination data of 10 patients and develop the information of search database based on contents. We analyzed the sample data and the requirements of patients, doctors, and nurses. By the analyzed result, we designed and constructed a prototype are as follow: the multimedia ORDBMS server system, network interface technology, internal/external database schema design, oriental medicine expert knowledge base design, inter-data search algorithm design and thesaurus.

A web based E-mail system consists of serves which supply mail accounts and service, and clients which take part of interfacing with users. The web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer are the popular clients. Users who cannot afford to get an E-mail id in general mail servers are, therefore, able to reach a e-mailing service in the web environment by using client programs in connection with a mail server. Although the quality of service has been upgraded a lot in recent days, it doesn't provide with satisfactory services anymore. In this paper, we intend to design a mail agent system based on the web environment. Through this system we could reach a convenient user interface based on Internet Explorer and could easily access administratory environment on the basis of NT Server 4.0. Using the service engine dominent in mail agent system, it could provide with convenient user interfacing tools like responding the absence of users, mail filtering and refusing messages, etc. And it would ultimately make possible a constant system security, by preventing system failure phenomena caused by extraordinary uses beyond its capability.

A retrieval performance of VOD sever is estimated by how quickly it services popular videos to users and how many users it is able to service. Each video data is placed on heterogeneous disks and placement techniques are various, retrieval performance is under the control of these elements, so that a retrieval performance is affected by placement policy. In this paper, we place video data considering their characteristics, especially, we place videos distributively according to their popularity. To verify our policy, we make various environment of experiment, estimate a placement policy using popularity of videos and a contrary policy, and compare them.

The content-based information retrieval for a multimedia database uses feature information extracted from the compressed videos. This paper presents an effective method to detect scene changes from compressed videos. Scene changes are detected with DC values of DCT coefficients in MPEG-1 encoded video sequences. Instead of decoding full frames. partial macroblocks of each frame, horizontal and vertical macroblocks, are decoded to detect scene changes. This method detects abrupt scene changes by decoding minimal number of blocks and saves a lot of computation time. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed based on the precision and the recall. The experimental results show the effectiveness in computation time and detection rate to detect scene changes of various MPEG-1 video streams.

This paper introduces a new technique for block is matching motion estimation. Since the temporal correlation of the image sequence, the motion vector of a block is highly related to the motion vector of the same coordinate block in the previous image frame. If we can obtain useful and enough information from the motion vector of the same coordinate block of the previous frame, the total number of search points used to find the motion vector of the current block may be reduced significantly. Using that idea, an efficient predicted direction search algorithm (PDSA) for block matching algorithm is proposed. Based on the direction of the blocks of the two successive previous frames, if the direction of the to successive blocks is same, the first search point of the proposed PDSA is moved two pixels to the direction of the block. The searching process after moving the first search point is processed according to the fixed search patterns. Otherwise, full search is performed with search area $\pm$2. Simulation results show that PSNR values are improved up to the 3.4dB as depend on the image sequences and improved about 1.5dB on an average. Search times are reduced about 20% than the other fast search algorithms. Simulation results also show that the performance of the PDSA scheme gives better subjective picture quality than the other fast search algorithms and is closer to that of the FS(Full Search) algorithm.

Real-time application programs have constraints which need to be met between media-data. These constraints represents the delay time ad quality of service between media-data to be presented. In order to efficiently describe the delay time and quality of service, a new synchronization mechanism is needed. Proposed paper is a dynamic synchronization that minimized the effects of adaptive transmission delay time. That is, the method meets the requirements of synchronization between media-dat by handling dynamically the adaptive waiting time resulted from variations of delay time. In addition, the mechanism has interval adjustment using maximum delay jitter time. This paper decreases the data loss resulted from variation of delay time and from loss time of media-data by means of applying delay jitter in order to deal with synchronization interval adjustment. Plus, the mechanism adaptively manages the waiting time of smoothing buffer, which leads to minimize the gap from the variation of delay time. The proposed paper is suitable to the system which requires the guarantee of high quality of service and mechanism improves quality of services such as decrease of loss rate, increase of playout rate.

A critical issue in the performance of a video-on-demand system is the I/O bandwidth required in order to satisfy client requests. Several approaches: batching, bridging, piggybacking are used ot reduce the I/O demand on the video server through sharing. Piggybacking is the policy for altering display rates of requests in progress fro the same object, for the purpose of merging their corresponding I/O streams into a single stream, which can serve the entire group of merged requests. In this paper, we propose a new policy called an adaptive reservation-based piggybacking that dynamically reserves the I/O stream capacity of video server for popular videos according to video server loads to immediately schedule the requests for popular videos. The performance of the proposed policy is evaluated through simulations, and is compared with that of simple piggybacking. As the result, we know that the adaptive reservation-based piggybacking provides better service probability, average waiting time and percentages saving in frames than simple piggybacking.

In this paper, we present a design and implementation of HDML(Handheld Device Markup Language) authoring tool that can create and mange HDML documents easily and conveniently, HDML is a markup language which enable acces to the Web using small mobile equipment through mobile networks. The basic limitation of mobile equipments and technical difficulties such as representation of HDML deck/card, definition of activation in each card and management of Hyper-link between cards are solved, in the development process of the HDML authoring tool.

A variety of multimedia applications require multimedia database management systems to manage multimedia data, such as text, image, and video, as well as t support content-based image or video retrieval. In this paper we design and implement a content-based image retrieval system, BADA-IV/I$^2$R(Image Information Retrieval), which is developed based on BADA-IV multimedia database management system. In this system image databases can be efficiently constructed and retrieved with the visual features, such as color, shape, and texture, of image. we extend SQL statements to define image query based on both annotations and visual features of image together. A high-dimensional index structure, called CIR-tree, is also employed in the system to provide an efficient access method to image databases. We show that BADA-IV/I$^2$R provides a flexible way to define query for image retrieval and retrieves image data fast and effectively: the effectiveness and performance of image retrieval are shown by BEP(Bull's Eye Performance) that is used to measure the retrieval effectiveness in MPEG-7 and comparing the performance of CIR-tree with those of X-tree and TV-tree, respectively.

As the multimedia application services have been getting various in Internet, need of multimedia database management system which can manage various multimedia information effectively has been increased. The multimedia application generally needs the features to store, manage, retrieve the multimedia data. We need a database management system framework that may be easily integrated with these features. This paper proposes th database management system framework providing the easy integration with various multimedia information retrieval. The framework uses OQL as the retrieval interface, so that user can use it easily. It can be integrated dynamically and easily with various multimedia retrieval method as a loosely coupled system. In addition there is no performance degradation caused in a loosely coupled system.

This paper presents a new method for an efficient coding of very low bit-rate color video based on adaptive wavelet transform. Our approach reveals that the coding process works more efficiently if the quantized wavelet coefficients are preprocessed by a mechanism exploiting the redundancies in the wavelet subband structure. Thus, we focuses optimized activity of coding part, and exhaustive overlapped block motion compensation is utilized to ensure coherency in motion compensated error frames, and raised cosine window is applied. The horizontal and vertical components of motion vectors are encoded separately using adaptive arithmetic coding while significant wavelet coefficients are encoded in bit-plane order using adaptive arithmetic coding. On average the proposed codec exceeds H.263 and ZTE in peak signal-to-noise ratio by as much as 2.07 and 1.38dB at 28 kbits, respectively. Fore entire sequence coding, 3DWCVC method is superior to H.263 and ZTE by 0.35 and 0.71dB on average, respectively.

BADA-IV/XML is a system designed specifically for managing XML. Documents and is essential to various electronic document applications as a fundamental system. BADA-IV/XML supports all of aspects of data model, querying and manipulation operations for managing XML documents. This paper provides an overview of these aspects of the BADA-IV/XML, as well as defines schema classes for stroing, querying and maintaining hierarchical semantics of multimedia documents and structural semantics of complex documents linked with each other, Also a multimedia document query language is designed and implemented to support essential operations for efficient searching and managing multimedia documents. Finally, some simulation results show the performance of the paged VF(Virtual Fragmentation) model and the search model using element's identifier as compared with a general model.

Multimedia communication systems require not only high-performance computer hardwares and high-speed networks, but also a buffer management mechanism to process many data efficiently. Two buffer handling methods, Push and Pull, are commonly used. In the Push method, a server controls the flow of dat to a client, while in the Pull method, a client controls the flow of data from a server. Those buffering schemes can be applied to the data transfer between the packet receiving buffer, which receives media data from a network server, and media playout devices, which play the recived media data. However, the buffer management mechanism in client-sides mainly support either one of the Push or the Pull method. Consequently, they have some limitations to support various media playout devices. Futhermore, even though some of them support both methods, it is difficult to use since they can't provide a unified structure. To resolved these problems, in this paper, we propose an efficient and flexible Push/Pull buffer management mechanism at client-side. The proposed buffer management scheme supports both Push and Pull method to provide various media playout devices and to support buffering function to absorb network jitter. The proposed scheme can support the various media playback devices using a single buffer space which in consequence, saves memory space compared to the case that a client keeps tow types of buffers. Moreover, it facilitates the single buffer as a mechanism for the absorbing network jitter effectively and efficiently. The proposed scheme has been implemented in an existing multimedia communication system, so called ISSA (Integrated Streaming Service Architecture), and it shows a good performance result compared to the conventional buffering methods in multimedia communication environments.

This paper describes design and implementation of a content manager in the Integrated Steaming Framework Architecture (ISSA) that is proposed by the authors. The ISSA can provide an environment to develop multimedia streaming applications under heterogeneous distributed systems. The goal of ISSA is to extend the limitations of existing streaming systems. It can support diverse media formats and high level programming environment for streaming application developers. Moreover, it is independent from underlying networks and operating systems, and compatible with the global real-time multimedia database system(BeeHive) so that streaming media is efficiently retrieved, stored, and serviced. The role of a content manager is important in the ISSA environment since it manages an information of media that are provided by the server, and allow users to access media more easily by means of conveying that information to the streaming server, Web server, and client efficiently. The proposed content manager is not only to meed these requirements, but also to provide streaming information to media source and transport manager in order to be an efficient streaming. Furthermore, it supports database transaction processing by using the database connector.