S'pore backs R&D in media tech

update SINGAPORE--Exploit Technologies, the commercialization arm for the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR), and the Media Development Authority (MDA) have made a pact with digital content broadcaster MediaCorp Technologies to drive research efforts in multimedia technologies in the country.

Under the memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed Wednesday, the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) will work with MediaCorp Technologies to research and develop technologies in three focus areas which encompass scalable video-coding systems, media indexing, search and retrieval systems, and interactive TV with camera phones. I2R is a government-funded technology research body that operates under A*STAR.

This collaboration closely follows the announcement also made yesterday by MDA to back research and development (R&D) activities in Singapore's interactive and digital media (IDM) industry.

The three focus areas also fall under one of the three key R&D areas spearheaded by MDA. Christopher Chia, chief executive officer at MDA, said: "This will also complement our R&D efforts in the area of media intermediary services, one of our key research areas in the Interactive and Digital Media sector."

The media intermediary services area will focus on cultivating technical capabilities in the organization, as well as the distribution and security of digital media.

Professor Lye Kin Mun, deputy executive director at I2R, said that IDM has been identified as a priority area for the republic, and the technology research body is already "actively involved in R&D efforts in this area".

"This MOU is a vital step in the development of cutting-edge interactive digital media technology, as it puts a commercial value on the research done by laboratories," said Mock Pak Lum, managing director at MediaCorp Technologies. "We are confident that working with A*STAR and I2R will enhance the creation of important search, indexing and encoding capabilities for our large content library."

Resizable video format
According to Exploit, most video streaming services available in the market are based on non-scalable video compression formats, and multiple versions of the same video have to be stored in order to cater to disparate viewing clients' requirements or limitations. As such, different versions of the same video content, for instance movie, would have to be encoded and stored.

An upcoming ISO standard on scalable video coding (SVC) is touted to "address these heterogeneous environments", and enable content to be encoded once into a highly scalable compressed file, which will simultaneously cater to viewing clients with different combinations of screen sizes, playback video frame rates, bandwidths, and quality levels.

I2R's SVC technologies will also help pave the way for the building of this next-generation media platform which "will enable MediaCorp to offer advanced media services to a broader audience", said Exploit.

Hassle-free media content retrieval
The multimedia indexing, search and retrieval system will allow users to retrieve objects and scenes in a video, similar to Google's retrieval system of Web pages, according to Exploit.

The system, which uses a semantics approach, will represent video content in various levels of semantic granularity, and will facilitate both low-level queries, such as "find me a video clip containing a round and red patch on the left", and also high-level queries such as "emotional scenes".