CETRI’s group of ICT (Information and Communications Technology), Multimedia and Video is composed from Engineers and Experts, across various fields with long experience in Research, Innovation, and Development.
ICT
Our ICT experts have been working on the application of computers and telecommunications equipment to store, retrieve, transmit and manipulate data, often in the context of a business or other enterprise, with huge experience in computers and computer networks, but also in other information distribution technologies and services such as internet, e-commerce.
More specifically, our fields of expertise can be listed, but not limited into the next main fields:
Databases and Database management systems
CETRI has a vast experience in Database management systems addressing the problem of storing and retrieving large amounts of data accurately and quickly. Designing and configuring database management systems that consist of a number of components that together allow the data they store to be accessed simultaneously by many users while maintaining its integrity.
Our experts have significant experience on the extensible markup language (XML) that has become a popular format for data representation in recent years. Although XML data can be stored in normal file systems, it is commonly held in relational databases to take advantage of their “robust implementation verified by years of both theoretical and practical effort”. As an evolution of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), XML’s text-based structure offers the advantage of being both machine and human-readable.
Data retrieval
CETRI experts operate on the relational database model that introduced a programming-language independent Structured Query Language (SQL), based on relational algebra.
Data transmission
Our engineers and experts are familiar with data transmission and its three aspects: transmission, propagation, and reception, that can be broadly categorised as broadcasting, in which information is transmitted unidirectionally downstream, or telecommunications, with bidirectional upstream and downstream channels.
XML has been increasingly employed as a means of data interchange since the early 2000s, particularly for machine-oriented interactions such as those involved in web-oriented protocols such as SOAP.
Data mining
Massive amounts of data are stored worldwide every day, but unless it can be analysed and presented effectively it essentially resides in what have been called data tombs: “data archives that are seldom visited”. To address that issue, CETRI has developed the field of data mining, extending and specializing the process of discovering interesting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data.
Multimedia & Video
CETRI’s Multimedia & Video experts have been working for many years acquiring huge expertise on the combination of different content forms, including a combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, or interactivity content forms.
Their experience applies to all multimedia forms, recorded and played, displayed, or accessed by information content processing devices, such as computerized and electronic devices, or a part of a live performance.
Image Processing
CETRI’s engineers and experts have established know how in imaging science, image processing as a form of signal processing for which the input is an image, such as a photograph or video frame while the output of image processing may be either an image or a set of characteristics or parameters related to the image.
Most image-processing techniques involve treating the image as a two-dimensional signal and applying standard signal-processing techniques to it.
Image processing usually refers to digital image processing, and includes the design of advanced APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for various and different fields of application like medical images, robotics, security, etc.
Cameras & Live Streaming
Our CETRI’s engineers and experts have established significant know how on cameras and streaming media technologies as a multimedia content that it is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider.
Live streaming, which refers to content delivered live over the Internet, requires a camera for the media, an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content.
CETRI’s engineers have deep knowledge on Streaming Protocols and Camera APIs. For the audio streams, compression technologies are well known with the usage of audio codec such as MP3, Vorbis or AAC. The video stream is compressed using a video codec such as H.264 or VP8. Encoded audio and video streams are assembled in a container bitstream such as MP4, FLV, WebM, ASF or ISMA.
The bitstream is delivered from a streaming server to a streaming client using a transport protocol, such as MMS or RTP. Newer technologies such as HLS, Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming, Adobe’s HDS and finally MPEG-DASH have been established as know how to our team, enabling adaptive bitrate streaming over HTTP as an alternative to using proprietary transport protocols.
Video Processing, Editing & Analytics
Video is the fastest growing data format on the Internet. Among other, social networking and digital TV, contribute to the gigantic size of online video repository.
Evolving technologies enable seamless production and consumption of video:
- ease of access to online services is becoming a commodity,
- mobile handheld devices are equipped with cameras and large screens (brightest example is the tablet hype),
- human behavior evolves to accept social networks and social sharing of information.
CETRI’s engineers and experts have established know how in Video Editing, Video Processing and Video Analytics
On Video Editing, our experts have advanced knowledge to the process of manipulating video images, including cutting segments (trimming), re-sequencing clips, and adding transitions and other Special Effects, in all main areas of the field:
- Non-linear editing system (NLE), using computers with video editing software
- Offline editing
- Online editing
- Vision mixing, working within live television and video production environments
CETRI engineers have established knowledge on video summary creation providing thumbnails of each scene. For a Video Clip (in on-line video editing site/application), can be provided thumbnails library, scenes library and association of scenes with metadata.
Technologies for Clip Search have been elaborated in order to find where the clip(s) (or scenes of those clips) exist in the working videos repositories.
Moreover Video DRM Identification – Verification techniques have been elaborated along with Redundancy Elimination (of pre-indexed) Video Repositories, with the capability to find if a video already exists in the database.
Video Analytics is also a new field of our CETRI experts, where on (pre-indexed) Video Repositories the elaborated technology can find where the video(s) (or scenes of this video) exist in the said repositories. On Video Streams, similar search can find where the video was played in the said stream(s). On Broadcast Video, searching can find in which TV station the said video(s) was played.
Moreover similar technologies can be applied to Advertisement Tracking in order to find in which TV station / Stream, the said advertising video(s) was played.