Judging by the continued expansion of the Internet and the development of broadband networks, more and more digital contents are being distributed over the network. One of the elements essential to foster the development of contents distribution is efficient and reliable copyright management technology. To realize this element, standardization of the content identifier system is indispensable because identifying the content is the very first step of the content management. The sophisticated content identifier that can be used in complicated and general usage scenarios over the Internet must satisfy the five requirements: 1) uniqueness in global environments, 2) persistency, 3) resolvability of locations, 4) inseparability from content, and 5) interoperability with other identifiers. A couple of groups around the world are considering content identifier standards with different views and purposes. However, the content ID promoted by the Content ID Forum (cIDf) satisfies all the above and is expected to be used as a standard ID on the Internet. By utilizing the content ID, the content owner/provider can manage content copyrights efficiently, and the user can get cheap content based on advertised models. As a result, the content ID will stimulate the creation of new contents distribution business models to mediate content-related services.

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The demand for video archiving systems that can efficiently manage a huge quantity of video contents and provides functions such as content-based indexing and retrieval has been growing in recent years. To realize such systems, the technologies of automatic video indexing and structuring are necessary. This paper describes the newest video archiving technologies.

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Recent home network revolution that has shifted to broadband and continuous connection is expected to cause reforming of the living environment and the industrial structure. “FTTH (Fiber-to-the-Home) Kanazawa Trial” was an experiment that realized an advance of the broad-band networks against the present network environment. The trial was the joint experiment between Matsushita corporations and NTT corporations. The joint experiment aimed at development and evaluation of the new Internet appliance. The trial team had developed “Home Gateway” prototype terminal. In addition to the web browsing, the terminal can play back the high quality contents known as MPEG2 and AAC, by a simple operation. The evaluation of the functions and operability of “Home Gateway” was carried out by the trial participants. This paper describes applications evaluating our new business model under broadband network environment, and discusses the future prospects of internet appliance based from the results of the trial.

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This paper proposes a new concept for a movie production system that utilizes a virtual environment and a computer network. The basis of the concept is that via a computer network anybody can be: (1) a performer, (2) a producer, and (3) the audience. A prototype composed of a server and client computers has been developed and is used to produce a movie based on both motion capture systems and CG animation. Experimental results confirm the feasibility of the system.

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This paper describes design, development and evaluation of VisualSHOCK MOVIE: A Video Hypermedia Software for Multimedia Education. At designing phase of VisualSHOCK MOVIE, we defined four system requirements, (1) Interactivity, (2) Easy Creation, (3) WWW Integration and (4) Streaming Support. And we designed and developed VisualSHOCK MOVIE based on these requirements. After that we created Multimedia Content for Elementary Education using VisualSHOCK MOVIE and made experiments for checking its system effectiveness. As a result, we evaluated results of experiments based on system requirements and proved its effectiveness.

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Recently, 3D image presentation with sharing its data on the computer network is expanding rapidly. However, it is not easy to provide optimal image data for each terminal with different performance on the same network. In this paper, an adaptive optimization technique is proposed for 3D image display, that is, receiving terminal can derive optimal data according to their own performance. So we can manage 3D data without considering receiver’s capability. Here, a new evaluation index of image quality is introduced to optimize display function under given display performance. The number of surfaces to compose 3D object, the texture image resolution, the number of texture images to describe 3D object and display speed are considered as significant control factors for display quality. The weight for each factors are obtained through subjective evaluation experiments. The optimizer on each terminal simplifies 3D display data according to those weights of control factors to maximize the index of display quality. A prototype of 3D display system is implemented to confirm this optimization procedure.

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The new color image processing using the concept of the representative color is described in this paper. The image area is partitioned into numbers of divided sub-block areas. The representative colors are extracted from each sub-block in accordance with the distribution of color vector. Then, color masking is applied to the representative colors within each sub-block, and each pixel element within each sub-block is approximated by the representative masked colors. The high-speed, high-quality color image processing has been achieved by this new technique. The simulation results show that the processing speed of the proposed method is two times faster than the conventional one. Moreover, the processing speed of proposed method by selecting the suitable number of representative colors in each block is improved about four times faster than the conventional one.

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In this paper, we propose a method of reconstructing color information for the 3D data based on VoxelColoring method. Errors in color reconstruction are due to the geometric factors and optical factors. The geometric factors are caused by the location among cameras, objects, light sources. The optical factors are caused by the material of an object and the characteristic of CCD and light sources. We are concerned with the geometric factors: the accuracy of color reconstruction can be evaluated by comparing the value of the color from a digital camera with one from reconstructed Voxel data.

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Multimedia communication services based on standard information, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H. 261 and H. 263, had been indicated using MSP: Multimedia Scalability Packages, which can provide multimedia information according to functionality and availability for users. This paper focused on video search as information search systems. We proposed MSP search system, in which MSP data is decoded in server side and is sent to search engine. Input parameters for searching are described on attached information using MSP. After a server receives that, MSP searching information and content information are decoded into the matching processor. Output MSP data is made by search system information and searching result in server side and is sent back to user side. In this system, search data is able to be controlled by MSP information description methods over networks, so this search system is useful in video search application. Moreover, in this paper, we indicated video retrieval methods using spatial scalable characteristics. After we also use the extension method in simulation experiments. Comparing proposed system with non-scalable search system, our system is effective by simulation results. Finally, it is indicated that our proposed system is useful from the viewpoint of processing time and functionality.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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Extracting personal characteristics from human movement is important for applications such as generating behaviors of CG actors. In this paper, we propose a new method for extracting personal characteristics from 3D human movement. We introduce the eigen action space to represent personal characteristics of human movement. First, we estimate an average action from the set of 3D pose parameters from different people. Then, we estimate the difference of the average action and each persons 3D pose parameters. The difference actions can be transformed into the eigen action using KL decomposition. Because the personal characteristics are represented as a point in eigen action space, we can easily calculate the similarity measure of actions from different people. Also new actions are synthesized from eigen action space. In this paper, we shows the experimental results using the real video sequences to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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A light transmission control using the electroosmotic convergence of liquid along the surface of a glass substrate has been studied. The experimental cell was composed of a thin liquid layer coated onto the glass plate with transparent interdigital electrodes. Dynamic behavior of the electroosmotic convergence of liquid was clarified and the flat pattern display device was successfully demonstrated. Experimental performance characteristics and response characteristics of the cells were investigated. The optimum volume of liquid coating for high sensitivity and fast response operation of the cells was also analyzed.

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Most of stereoscopic displays requiring no special spectacles are expensive and complex. In this paper, we propose a new stereoscopic display, composing simply at low cost. It consists of a half-mirror, two prism sheets, two fresnel convergent lenses, and two 2D-displays. This prism sheet has blind surface in one side of prisms, which has the property of absorbing light. This system divides the parallax images of right and left using the critical angle and blind surface of prism sheets. To evaluate the performance of this proposed display, we actually made a prototype display. As a result of doing some experiments, the fundamental effectiveness of this stereoscopic display was confirmed.

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