Communications, Signal Processing and Control, University of Southampton

Communications, Signal Processing and Control

Source Coding


Flawless Holographic Telepresence... Prof Lajos Hanzo

In the current research era the community may be expected to turn to radical wireless 'tele-presence' research. This requires flawless high-performance audio/video codecs, which are resilient against transmission errors.  The resultant stream then has to be error correction coded in order to correct the transmission errors and then transmitted over hostile wireless channels with the aid of bandwidth-efficient, yet low-power-consumption 'green' transmitters and receivers (transceivers) for three-dimensional (3D) audio/video communications.

So-called stereoscopic video systems may be constructed with the aid of a pair of cameras, which are typically mounted on a rigid rig at a distance of the typical human viewer in order to produce images of what the left and right eye would see. The resultant two-channel video stream may then be stored, transmitted and finally viewed with the aid of stereoscopic displays, but the viewers have to wear specially designed goggles.

Some of the related stereoscopic multimedia components are becoming a commercial reality: 

http://www.inition.co.uk/

Provided that the video source signal is recorded from 9-16 different angles/views, more realistic holographic viewing becomes possible without requiring any goggles: 

http://www.holografika.com/ 

Our team at Southampton is well equipped with the above-mentioned 3D multimedia components, including a cutting-edge holographic display  http://www.holografika.com/Products/HoloVizio-128WLD.html Since the 16 cameras deliver highly correlated video sequences, it is anticipated that a large amount of the predictable, ie 'redundant' information may be removed with the aid of holographic video compression. Our further goal is then to investigate the transmission of the holographic information over hostile wireless channels by inflicting realistic channel-induced hologram-corruption and study their visual effects. Then we embark on designing sophisticated counter-measures using error correction coding and concealment for transmission in 3D holographic tele-presence scenarios. The investigated systems will also be appraised with the aid subjective testing in the context of the Southampton Open Wireless Network.  http://www.sown.org.uk

More information can be found in http://www-mobile.ecs.soton.ac.uk/newcomms/?q=res/int/source_new