Scalable Video Collaboration

Professor Farzad Safaei, University of Wollongong, Australia

Abstract
Increasingly, users regard the Internet as a meeting place, where they can form communities and interact with groups of people as part of their work, play, education, or social interaction with family and friends. This phenomenon is likely to create a significant demand for multiperson-to-multiperson video communications. However, the conventional video conferencing systems cannot scale to support a large number of participants. This lack of scalability is partly technical and partly cognitive.
In this talk, I will describe and evaluate both barriers to scalability and demonstrate that these hurdles can be removed in our proposed immersive video conferencing (IVC) system1. In particular, three main techniques are presented to improve scalability of video dissemination in a large-scale gathering. These include visibility culling, quality culling and saliency ranking of video streams in response to the user’s perspective within an IVC. Simulation and experimental results provide ample justification on effectiveness of these methods to deal with network load and congestion.

Short Bio
Farzad Safaei graduated from the University of Western Australia with the degree of Bachelor of Engineering (Electronics) and obtained his PhD in Telecommunications Engineering from Monash University, Australia. Currently, he is the Professor of Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Wollongong. Before joining the University of Wollongong, he was the Manager of Internetworking Architecture and Services Section in Telstra Research Laboratories. His main research interest during the last 10 years has been on advanced multimedia processing and communications, including immersive multimedia and free viewpoint video. He was the co-founder of Spatial Voice Pty Ltd, specializing in 3D voice communication technology in 2006, which was later acquired by Dolby corporation. He is also the founder and CEO of iSee Video Collaboration (iSeeVC Pty Ltd – iseevc.com).
Professor Safaei is the winner of a number of awards, including the top Australian and Asia Pacific Awards for ICT R&D in 2012.

Time: 14:30-15:30, Wednesday 17th of Dey, 1393
Place: Kharazmi Hall, Level 4, Department of Computer Engineering,
Sharif University of Technology

¹ Safaei, F., Pourashraf, P., Franklin, D., “Large-scale immersive video conferencing by altering video quality and distribution based on the virtual context”, IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume: 52, Issue: 8 pp. 66-72, 2014.