With recent flourishing of embedded media applications such as MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1 encoders/decoders and wireless broadband communication infrastructures such as 3G, WiMax and Wi-Fi, real-time multimedia computing and communications on embedded systems becomes a major focus for both software and hardware designers. In the first part of the talk, the tradeoff between several design choices is analyzed, including the RISC processor, the SIMD processor and the dedicated ASIC. Then, in the second half of the talk, three emerging R&D efforts will be highlighted. First, the design of a multi-format video codec to strike a balance between flexibility and performance is addressed. This is motivated by the observation that there are multiple audio/video compression formats to be adopted currently. The trend of embedded processors is to support a wide range of audio/video formats such as MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1. The design of multi-format codec demands a careful architecture consideration. Second, we consider the design of low-complexity integrated encryption and compression speech/video coding algorithms, which can significantly lower the power consumption of mobile terminals for the digital rights management (DRM). This gives an example of lower power design from an algorithmic level. Third, the rate-distortion-complexity (RDC) optimized video coding techniques are discussed. We emphasize a concept called “decoding-friendly encoder design”, where many computational heavy operations can be saved at the decoder end while high visual quality can still be preserved.

Dr. C.-C. Jay Kuo received the Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. He is now with the University of Southern California (USC) as Professor of EE, CS and Mathematics. His research interests are in the areas of digital media processing, multimedia compression, communication and networking technologies, and embedded multimedia system design. Dr. Kuo is a Fellow of IEEE and SPIE. He received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award (NYI) and Presidential Faculty Fellow (PFF) Award in 1992 and 1993, respectively. Dr. Kuo has guided about 70 students to their Ph.D. degrees and supervised 15 postdoctoral research fellows. Currently, his research group at USC consists around 40 Ph.D. students and 5 postdoctors (please visit website http://viola.usc.edu), which is one of the largest academic research groups in multimedia technologies. He is a co-author of more than 100 journal papers, 600 conference papers and 7 books. Dr. Kuo is Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, and Editor for the Journal of Information Science and Engineering. He was on the Editorial Board of the EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology and IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing.