/ Qiangfu Zhao / Associate Professor
/ Jintae Lee / Assistant Professor
/ Ruck Thawonmas / Assistant Professor
The multimedia devices presently available add sound, still pictures, and moving pictures to traditional computer displays which show only text and diagrams. The addition of these few functions, however, offers remarkable convenience to the user of such multimedia devices. For this reason, it is widely believed that the impact of these devices on human society in the near future will be extremely great.
The properties desirable for multimedia devices can be visualized on a graph with two axes. The horizontal axis represents a device's capacity for depth and variety of communication and the vertical axis represents the capacity for naturalness and high fidelity. Ideally, multimedia devices should be far along both axes if they are to offer the most comfortable and efficient human interfaces. Unfortunately, progress along these dimensions has not gone far enough. Prolonged use of computers still fatigues the body and fails to match the depth and quality of communication that can exist between humans in face-to-face encounters.
For example, human beings can communicate with great ease and variety through the spoken word. Computers can't. In spite of the fact that speech synthesis by computers is almost perfect, speech recognition has not reached the level of practical application that natural speech can achieve. Furthermore speech recognition algorithms are overly sensitive to existing noise. The area of speech recognition is still in the primitive stages and needs to evolve further to make multimedia devices more effective.
Future multimedia systems should be able to accept and recognize natural information. While traditional multimedia systems provide more and more information, future systems should be able to select, and provide useful and important information. One project in this laboratory is to study how to build such kind of intelligent multimedia systems. Our short-term goal is to build a system that can recognize 3D characters and documents. The long-term goal is to construct a system that can recognize nature images and speeches.
Sign language is another means of human communication that computers cannot participate in as easily as those who are forced to use it because of hearing impairment. If a computer could be made to communicate via this medium, far more people could access intellectual services and actively participate in multimedia that have been unable to do so thus far. At present, pioneer research to incorporate this dimension of communication as far as synthesis and recognition technology has just begun in our laboratory.
As for the dimension of high fidelity, the digitalization of high definition TV is one example of progress that has been made along the vertical axis. Signal processing technology is indispensable for the generation, processing, and recognition of visual, auditory and control signals. Furthermore, multimedia devices are preferable to work in real-time. These requirements can be fulfilled not only by high computing processor speeds and large memories, but also by fast algorithms. Therefore, the study of signal processing is fundamental in our laboratory.
Refereed Journal Papers