MMTC Meeting Minutes

It is very nice to greet everybody again after coming back from the beautiful Dresden and the ICC 2009. The MMTC had a wonderful meeting during the conference and we have seen many old friends as well as new faces in the meeting. Drs. Qian Zhang and Bin Wei have come up a wonderful meeting minutes to share all the details of the meeting to our fellow members including a few photos taken there. Please read the report at the pages 3-5. In this Issue, we feature a Special Issue on Visual Analysis for Communications, which contains six position papers from world top scientists in the field. highlights the challenges in the emerging multimedia sensor networks (MMSN), and introduces the concept of employing directional link networks to address these difficulties in the MMSN system. At last, in the IG column, Drs. Technology, USA) give a brief introduction on the home networking interest group with the associated research topics and the exciting events that have been run by this IG. Now let us explore more inside the Special Issue on Visual Analysis for Communications. The papers can be classified into three categories: (1) Object segmentation and tracking The first three papers fall into this area. In the first paper delivered by Drs. the evolving history and key ideas in semantic object segmentation have been briefly reviewed and the challenges are highlighted; In the second paper, Prof. T. N. Pappas (Northwestern University, USA) demonstrates how to use mathematical and perceptual models for image and video segmentation with rich examples and results; After that, Drs. demonstrate a centroid shift based object tracking algorithm as an alternative solution of mean-shift tracking, which has low computation costs and good stability. discusses the emerging challenges in large scale content management, such as meaningful video summary, activity analysis, content retrieval, and the distributed content processing capability. (3) Video analysis for coding & communication In the last two papers, the applications of video analysis for coding and communications are covered. The paper by Dr. P. L. Correia (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal) discusses how the segmentation and feature extraction can be used to optimize the coding parameters in video communications. Drs. P. Nunes (Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa, Portugal) and F. Pereira (Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal) overview the rate control approaches adopted in the video coding standards, and point out major challenges. Clearly there are …