Spring 2011 (RA)

Courses:
- CMPT 771: Internet Architectures and Protocols
- CMPT 885 : Special Topics, Computer Architecture

Discussed with Cheng about what needs to be done short term. I have started writing a related work section on SVN, and I am focusing on peer discovery in wireless ad hoc networks as my first priority. At the moment, some work seems to have been done, and I will continue searching for more related work in order to stimulate new ideas. I have found an interesting article about how mobile devices can keep a routing table of surrounding nodes, but the article is too generic and would like to get something more detailed.
As Cheng and I agreed, this part of the whole scheme seems to be the hardest, and it might not be possible to implement this on Android, despite its promised "openess". For example, we suspect such feature has been blocked for some business reasons. One of his colleague spent over 2 weeks on trying to enable this without success.
Was also busy with 2 assignments for CMPT 771; all done.
Will work tonight and tomorrow on finding which phone is the best, and start the ordering process with Jason so we can have them ASAP
This week, I will continue working on the related work section, finish what I have started with peer discovery, and jump to ad hoc routing, where we need to find a good protocol for it.

Read more about view synthesis for video plus depth, and tried to better understand my previous readings as some of them had a lot of information. Gathered a list of requirements for streaming 3D videos to mobile devices, which is available on the wiki.
Read about tethering for mobile devices, and am currently gathering requirtements for a system where users could share and resell their unused data of their data plans. I am meeting Cheng over Skype on the 26th. Again, our ideas are available on the wiki.

Read a paper about various types of coding used in 3D technologies. Surprisingly, H.264/MVC does not seem to add that much of compression when considering the significant increase of processing power required for decoding. On the other hand, Video plus depth requires a fraction of bitrate of its coloured counterpart (in the range of 10-20%) in order to achieve high quality. Multiview video plus depth coding can be useful in order to estimate views instead of sending them. Such process can again, be computionally expensive, and estimation algorithms are still not perfect. However, such method has an interesting aspect to it: one could use multiview video plus depth in order to have a proxy storing the video, and estimates the specific number of views required for the device that needs to display the video. The beauty of this is the flexibility when it comes to support a broad array of mobile devices.

In my readings, I have found that MPEG-3 Part C can be used for Video Plus Depth, something that should be looked a bit more into. It gives some flexibility when it comes to how to encode the colour video, and the depth map independently. H.264 Auxiliary Picture Syntax, on the other hand, does not offer such flexiblity

Had a busy weekend with my birthday ;-) But, also worked on the presentation I gave about 3D videos during our weekly team meeting. During the same week, I got familiar with the concept of remote rendering. I have read about some previous experiments where it was used in a virtual reality environment, and how the concept was used to improve the current viewpoint selection process on mobile devices. The papers helped me understand the concept, and the various way a proxy server could be used, even if it was used in a freeview point context rather than a stereo video one. For example, it can be used to partially render a video, or even completely. GPUs could also be used if needed. However, the problematic being solved being different than the one I am focusing on, the aspect of computing the reference frames needed when a user change the viewpoint was of little interest.

Fall 2010 (TA)

Worked on Litterature Survey of 3D technologies, and understanding the current research areas with a focus on those that are related to the field of 3DTV on Mobile Devices. Also, I got familiar with a power measurement tool for Android, and understand how to apply it in the context of academic research.