Objectives

The course has the goal to present, study and discuss the technologies used in Digital Media, considering the following topics:

• Main characteristics of different media types and its digital representation.
• Multimedia information processing.
• Architectures, software models and environments for building multimedia applications.
• Structuring and navigation models of multimedia and hypermedia information.
• Systems and advanced applications including mobile applications, tangible interfaces and augmented reality.

Program

• Introduction: overview and challenges
• Multimedia information
• Static information and dynamic information
• Text, image, audio and video: characteristics and computational representation
• Color Representation
• Sampling, spatial and temporal resolution
• Formats and representation standards, compression and transmission
• Information Processing
• Filters
• Segmentation
• Feature extraction
• Development of applications integrating digital media
• Multimedia project
• Tools and development environments
• Architecture and application development
• Hypermedia systems
• Models and examples
• Narrative and hypermedia
• Multimedia applications on mobile devices, tangible interfaces and augmented reality

Teaching

Two hours of lectures per week. Schedule: Thursday, 14h-16h. Support in project development.

Assignments and Evaluation

Throughout the semester two assignments are proposed:

1) Survey paper (half-page proposal: April 19), due date: June 9

State of the art paper, on topics related with the course, with a theme proposed by us or proposed by the student and approved by us. This work is done individually and it must have a maximum of 8 pages using the ACM format. It is important to include a critical perspective on the subject and to compare different approaches and paradigms. A map of concepts such as the ones produced in Miro or VUE environment could be used although this is not required. An example, in this case applied to augmented reality, is available from the ACM Digital Library. This example was published in one of the most important conferences in the area – ISMAR and (PDF only available where there is a subscription to the ACM DL).

2) Project specification, including architecture and developed components OR analysis of an existing system (half-page proposal: April 19), due date: June 9

The project specification or analysis identifies the requirements, includes a detailed description of the system architecture and some specific components. Guidelines for project presentation are available. For class diagrams the UML language can be used and about this language there is diverse information such as Quick Reference and UML 2 Class Diagrams. Generic tools for building diagrams are available such as UMLet and Violet.

Presentation date: Week starting June 17, TBD (Porto?)
Oral presentation of the project and survey.

Bibliography

• Scientific papers, including the ones available from the ACM Digital Library (Association for Computing Machinery). Other information sources are Citeseer and Google Scholar.
• Programming Interactivity: A Designer's Guide to Processing, Arduino, and openFrameworks, Joshua Noble, Joshua Noble, Publisher: O'Reilly Media Released: July 2009.
• Multimédia e Tecnologias Interactivas, Nuno Ribeiro, FCA, 5ª Edição, 2012.
  [In Portuguese]
• Fundamentals of Multimedia, Ze-Niam Li, Mark S. Drew, Pearson, Prentice Hall, 2014.
• Course slides.