Hermann Hellwagner in a BITMOVIN Webinar featuring ATHENA

Video streaming is not for online video providers alone. Telco providers are equal players in the game of adaptive video streaming, but to stand out, there is a constant demand for innovations at the edge.

Join us for an interview session between Bitmovin Solution Architect, Adrian Britton, and Alpen Adria University Professor, Dr. Hermann Hellwagner, as they discuss some of the latest research around Edge Computing solutions that will improve functionality for mobile network and CDN providers.

Find here the “Latest Edge Computing Innovations for Video Streaming (ft. ATHENA)”  Webinar Recording    of 14th June 2022.

 

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Hadi Amirpour to give a talk at Fraunhofer FOKUS MWS

Video Encoding Optimizations for Live Video Streaming

FOKUS Media Web Symposium

20th – 24th June 2022 | Berlin, Germany

 

Abstract: Live video streaming is expected to become mainstream in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks. Optimizing video encoding for live video streaming is challenging due to the latency introduced by any optimization method. In this talk, we introduce low-latency video optimization methods that are utilized to improve the quality of video encodings by predicting optimized encoding parameters.

Hadi Amirpour is a postdoc research fellow at ATHENA  directed by Prof. Christian Timmerer. He received his B.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, and he pursued his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering. He got his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Klagenfurt in 2022. He was appointed co-chair of Task Force 7 (TF7) Immersive Media Experience (IMEx) at the 15th Qualinet meeting. He was involved in the project EmergIMG, a Portuguese consortium on emerging imaging technologies, funded by the Portuguese funding agency and H2020. Currently, he is working on the ATHENA project in cooperation with its industry partner Bitmovin. His research interests are image processing and compression, video processing and compression, quality of experience, emerging 3D imaging technology, and medical image analysis.

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Radu Prodan is Guest Advisor and Content Acquisition Editor of the Open Research Europe, the European Commission’s fully open access publishing platform.

https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/collections/cloud-based-technologies/about

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A Webbing Journey @ A1 Austria eSports Festival 2022

On Saturday (June 18, 2022), Sebastian Uitz presented his game “A Webbing Journey” with his partner Manuel Santner at the A1 Austria eSports Festival in the Austria Center Vienna. The game didn’t fit into the Esports-themed event, but the 2 PCs prepared to play the game were constantly used by players of all ages. Especially the target audience (children 8-12) had so much fun, and the parents had to wait until the kids were done playing. The event was a great success as it was the biggest play session yet and resulted in tons of feedback that will be implemented and bugs that will be fixed until the next event.

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FIRST INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON INTELLIGENT AND ADAPTIVE EDGE-CLOUD OPERATIONS AND SERVICES

Short description: The Intel4EC workshop aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners from academia and industry to present their experiences, results and research progress covering architectural designs, methods and applications of AI/ML-enabled Edge-Cloud operations and services. By bringing together these research topics, Intel4EC looks forward to help the community define open standards, AI/ML benchmarks that contribute to experiment reproducibility and systematize the complete management pipeline for a myriad of Cloud-Edge operations.

Organisers: Nishant Saurabh, Zhiming Zhao and Dragi Kimovski

Website and call for papers: https://www.intel4ec-workshop.nl/
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Paper Accepted: Evaluation of Relevance-Driven Compression of Regular Cataract Surgery Videos

IEEE 35th International Symposium on Computer Based Medical Systems (CBMS), July 21-23, Shenzen, China

https://2022.cbms-conference.org

Authors: Natalia Mathá, Klaus Schoeffmann, Stephanie Sarny, Doris Putzgruber-Adamitsch and Yosuf El-Shabrawi

Abstract: In recent years, the utilization intensity and thus the demand for storing cataract surgery videos for different purposes has increased. Hospitals continuously improve their technical recording equipment, i.e., cameras, to enhance the post-operative processing efficiency of the recordings. However, afterward, the videos are stored on hospitals’ internal data servers in their original size, which leads to a massive storage consumption. In this paper, we propose a relevance-based compression scheme. First, we perform a user study with clinicians to define the relevance rates of regular cataract surgery phases. Then, we compress different phases based on the determined relevance rates, using different encoding parameters and two coding standards, namely H.264/AVC and AV1. Afterward, the medical experts evaluate the visual quality of the encoded videos. Our results show a storage-saving potential for H.264/AVC of up to 95.94% and up to 98.82% for AV1, excluding idle phases (no tools are visible).

 

 

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Paper Accepted: DeepPyram: Enabling Pyramid View and Deformable Pyramid Reception for Semantic Segmentation in Cataract Surgery Videos

25th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, September 18-22, 2022, Singapore

https://conferences.miccai.org/2022/en/

Authors: Negin Ghamsarian, Mario Taschwer, Raphael Sznitman, Klaus Schoeffmann

Abstract: Semantic segmentation in cataract surgery has a wide range of applications contributing to surgical outcome enhancement and clinical risk reduction. However, the varying issues in segmenting the different relevant structures in these surgeries make the designation of a unique network quite challenging. This paper proposes a semantic segmentation network termed, DeepPyram, that can deal with these challenges using three novelties: (1) a Pyramid View Fusion module which provides a varying-angle global view of the surrounding region centering at each pixel position in the input convolutional feature map; (2) a Deformable Pyramid Reception module which enables a wide deformable receptive field that can adapt to geometric transformations in the object of interest; and (3) a dedicated Pyramid Loss that adaptively supervises multi-scale semantic feature maps. Compbined we show that these can effectively boost semantic segmentation performance, especially in the case of transparency, deformability, scalability, and blunt edges in objects. We demonstrate that our approach performs at a state-of-the-art level and outperforms a number of existing methods without imposing additional trainable parameters.

 

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MMM’22 Community Leadership Award for Klaus Schöffmann

For his continuous support of the International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling (MMM) and his ongoing contributions to the MMM community, yesterday Assoc.Prof. Klaus Schöffmann was awarded with the MMM’22 Community Leadership Award at the Gala Dinner in Phu Quoc, Vietnam.

 

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ITEC @ LNDF was a big success

This years´s “Lange Nacht der Forschung” took place on May 20, 2022. The LNDF is Austria´s most significant national research event to present the accomplishments to the broad public. ITEC was represented by three stations and involved in the station of Computer Games and Engineering, and it was a fantastic experience for everyone! We tried to make our research easily understandable for everyone.

 

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Paper Accepted: Efficient Transparent Access to 5G Edge Services

1st International Workshop on Edge Network Softwarization (ENS 2022) co-located with IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2022)  Milan, Italy

Authors: Josef Hammer and Hermann Hellwagner, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Abstract: Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is a central piece of 5G telecommunication systems and is essential to satisfy the challenging low-latency demands of future applications. MEC provides a cloud computing platform at the edge of the radio access network that developers can utilize for their applications. In [1] we argued that edge computing should be transparent to clients and introduced a solution to that end. This paper presents how to efficiently implement such a transparent approach, leveraging Software-Defined Networking. For high performance and scalability, our architecture focuses on three aspects: (i) a modular architecture that can easily be distributed onto multiple switches/controllers, (ii) multiple filter stages to avoid screening traffic not intended for the edge, and (iii) several strategies to keep the number of flows low to make the best use of the precious flow table memory in hardware switches. A performance evaluation is shown, with results from a real edge/fog testbed.

Keywords: 5G, Multi-Access Edge Computing, MEC, Patricia Trie, SDN, Software-Defined Networking