Note: this page is maintained for historical reasons. In July 2004 the CCSP group evolved into two new groups: Communication and Collaboration Systems and Knowledge Tools.

Media processing, communications, and collaboration tools are exciting new application areas for computers. Our group focuses on advancing the state-of-the-art and developing robust technologies and novel applications in these areas. Our goal is for people to think of their computers as the main tool for multimedia recording, storage, retrieval, communication, collaboration and entertainment.

Our work falls into three basic areas:

• Information Coding and Communication Systems - coding and communication of media signals, including streaming media on demand, live broadcast, real-time communication, messaging, and environment browsing, over existing, emerging, and novel network configurations.
• Statistical Media Processing - applying signal processing and machine learning tools to solving problems in media identification, classification, clustering, filtering, enhancement, recommendation, organization, and retrieval.
• Collaboration and Communication Applications developing technologies and prototypes for collaborative systems, including audio, video, and data capturing, recording, transmitting and sharing, person-to-person or group-to-group.

Primary Contact: Philip A. Chou
Affiliate Members
Bishop, Christopher	Cohen, Michael	Cutler, Ross	Florencio, Dinei
He, Li-wei	Li, Jin	Malvar, Rico	Meek, Chris
Photo Not Available Mehrotra, Sanjeev	Rui, Yong	Simard, Patrice	Wong, Curtis
Zhang, Zhengyou	Zhu, Bin

Some of our projects and contributions to Microsoft products include:

MSAudio - the audio compression algorithm that has now evolved into Windows Media Audio (WMA), a key component of Windows Media Technologies.

Layered Multicast with layered signal coding and layered error correction, a more efficient way to broadcast video over the Internet to viewers using different bandwidths.

AutoDJ - a system for automatically generating music playlists.

Intelligent people tracking - automatically detecting and tracking speakers in a meeting or a lecture, using audio-visual data, including camera management algorithms for automatic unattended broadcasting of lectures.

Audio fingerprinting - automatic identification of a the occurrence of a known clip in an audio stream, even after moderate distortions.

iCam a lecture room camera management system that records and broadcasts presentations fully automatically.

RingCam - an omnidirectional camera that captures 360-degree video, for conferencing applications. The RingCam is a component of our Distributed Meetings prototype.

Microphone array - which will push forward the state of the art in speech capture for desktop and meeting room conferencing applications. The microphone array is also a component of our Distributed Meetings system.

PhotoTOC - a system for automatically generating albums of pictures, to help users manage their growing collections of digital pictures.

Acoustic echo cancellation for enabling hands-free real-time telephony in applications such as Windows Messenger

Whiteboard capture - a system that captures whiteboards using digital cameras. Timing information is preserved and key frames are automatically generated, for synchronized audio-whiteboard browsing.

Face Modeling - generating realistic 3D human face models and facial animations from live video, and their use in communications and collaboration applications.

Converting Classifier Outputs to Probabilities - this project adds an extra learning layer to classifiers, so their outputs can be interpreted as probabilities; that way they can be more easily combined with other systems, such as language models.

Kernel Methods and Support Vector Machines - these are widely used methods for machine learning for classification and regression estimation problems; in this project we derived several uniqueness theorems and stability results for these models.

Here is a sample of our recent publications. Please see the author's individual Web pages for electronic versions and more details.

• H. S. Malvar and D. A. F. Florncio, Improved spread spectrum: a new modulation technique for robust watermarking, IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, vol. 51, pp. 898905, Apr., 2003.
• D. Kirovski, H. S. Malvar, and Y. Yacobi, Multimedia Content Screening using a Dual Watermarking and Fingerprinting System, Proc. ACM Multimedia 2002, Juan Les Pins, France, Dec. 2002. Best Paper Award.
• Y. Chen, Y. Rui, and T. Huang, Parametric Contour Tracking Using Unscented Kalman Filter, Proc. IEEE ICIP 2002, Rochester NY, Sept,. 2002
• C. BenAbdelkader, R. Cutler and L. Davis, Person identification using automatic height and stride estimation, IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Qubec, Canada, Aug. 2002.
• A. Sehgal and P. A. Chou, Cost-distortion optimized streaming media over DiffServ networks, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Lausanne, August 2002. Best Paper Award.
• A. Klein, T. Grant, A. Finkelstein, and Michael F. Cohen, Video Mosaics, Proc. NPAR 2002, June, 2002
• C. Burges, J. Platt, S. Jana, Extracting noise-robust features from audio data, Proc. ICASSP 2002, Orlando, FL, May 2002.
• J. Chakareski, P.A. Chou, and B. Aazhang, Computing rate-distortion optimized policies for streaming media to wireless clients, IEEE Data Compression Conference, Snowbird, UT, April 2002.
• J. Platt, C. Burges, S. Swenson, C. Weare, and A. Zheng, Learning a Gaussian process prior for automatically generating music playlists, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14, Dec. 2001.
• Z. Liu, Z. Zhang, C. Jacobs, and M. Cohen, Rapid modeling of animated faces from video, Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation, 12, 4, 227-240, 2001.
• Y. Rui and Y. Chen, Better proposed distributions: object tracking using unscented particle filter, Proc. CVPR 2001, II-786-793.
• Y. Chen, Y. Rui, and T. S. Huang, JPDAF-based HMM for real-time contour tracking (outstanding student paper award), Proc. CVPR 2001, I-543-550.
• Y. Rui, L.-w. He, A. Gupta and Q. Liu, Building an intelligent camera management system, Proc. ACM Multimedia, Ottawa, Canada, Sept. 2001.
• L. Luo, J. Li, S. Li, Z. Zhuang and Y. Zhang, Motion compensated lifting wavelet and its application in video coding, in IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Tokyo, Japan, Aug. 2001.
• B. W. Gillespie, D. A. F. Florncio, and H. S. Malvar, Speech dereverberation via maximum-kurtosis subband adaptive filtering, in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Salt Lake City, Utah, May 2001.
• C. Herley and W. W. Ping, Minimum rate sampling and reconstruction of signals with arbitrary frequency support, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 45, pp. 1555-1564, July 1999.
• R. Cutler and L. Davis, Robust real-time periodic motion detection, analysis, and applications, IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, pp. 781-796, Aug. 2000
• J. Platt, Fast training of support vector machines using sequential minimal optimization, in Advances in Kernel Methods - Support Vector Learning, B. Schlkopf, C. Burges, and A. Smola, eds., MIT Press, 1999.
• H. Malvar, Biorthogonal and nonuniform lapped transforms for transform coding with reduced blocking and ringing artifacts, IEEE Trans. Signal Processing,, pp. 1043-1053, April 1998.