Virtual Media (Vmedia) Interactive Image Browsing

Figure 1. Web page with an embedded Vmedia image browser.

Virtual media interactive image browser is able to browse large image (16kx16k) over slow Internet link (33.6kbps). It has applications for viewing large images on the web, such as aerophotograhy, digital museum, e-commerce, etc.. While downloading or streaming the large compressed image may take minutes or even hours, Vmedia interactive image browser can browse the image with ease, at very low bitrate. In the Vmedia image browser, the user choose a region of interest(ROI) to browse, which is a certain spatial area of the image at a certain resolution. The browser then chooses from the master bitstream the portion of the compressed bitstream corresponding to the current ROI, and delivery only that portion of the bitstream, and delivery it in a prioritized fashion.

There are two key technologies in the Vmedia interactive browser.

  1. Modular bitstream:

    The compressed bitstream is in a modular fashion, so that the compressed bitstream of a ROI can be located from the entire master bitstream. This is achieved by compressing the image using JPEG 2000, for more details of the JPEG 2000, please refer my tutorial here.

  2. Manage, delivery and cache the portion of the bitstream:

    This is achieved by virtual media (Vmedia) architecture. In the Vmedia, the client establishes a mirror file of the remote media (in this case, the JPEG 2000 compressed master bitstream) on the client side. The file is virtual in the sense that it can be considered a cache (segment of file cache) of the remote media. Segment of the compressed master bitstream are then downloaded, cached and managed just-in-time to deliver the experience of fast interactive image browsing.

For details of the work, please refer to the following papers.

©Copyright by Jin Li, June 22, 2001