Course catalogue

Introduction to Multimedia. Basic multimedia concepts, current state-of-the-art. Multimedia content generation. Digital data acquisition: analog and digital signals, analog-to-digital conversion, signals and systems, sampling theorem and aliasing, filtering, Fourier analysis. Media representations and media formats: digital image representation, aspect ratio, digital image formats, digital video representation, video signal type, YUV subsampling schemes, digital video formats, digital audio representation, surround sound, spatial audio, commonly used audio formats. Color theory: trichromacity theory, color spaces. Multimedia compression: the need for compression, basic information theory concepts, lossless and lossy compression. Image compression: redundancy and correlation of image data, lossless image coding, transform image coding, wavelet based coding. Video compression: general video compression theory (temporal redundancy, block-based frame prediction, motion vectors' computation, macroblock dimensions), prediction types, video coding standards. Audio compression: audio compression theory, audio as a waveform, audio compression using psychoacoustics, model-based audio compression, audio coding standards. Multimedia distribution. Multimedia networking: communication modes, multimedia communication standards and protocols.

The aim of this course is for students to:

• understand the basic concepts related to the representation, encoding and transmission of multimedia data
• become familiar with the process of digitization of all types of media, and to be able to explain theoretical and practical details, issues in rendering on various display/audio devices, and formats of various types of media
• have the ability to analyze the individual features of the different types of multimedia data (e.g., image, video, audio)
• understand the theoretical and practical limits for information compression and to be able to describe some compression techniques for various types of media, as well as the important compression standards
• know about the distribution of compressed content and to be able to describe the fundamentals of digital communications
• understand that an important issue for end users is the stable and synchronized flow of multimedia information, in the presence of varying network throughput, variable time delay and errors, and know how that can be achieved
• know the principles and current technologies of multimedia systems
• have the ability to develop multimedia applications.

Not required.

Lectures, resolving exercises, assignment

Assignment (using Open Source tools for production, processing and synthesis of multimedia content) and its presentation - 20% of the final grade

Final written examination - 80% of the final grade

Detailed information regarding the conduct and evaluation of the course can be found in the course e-class (https://eclass.icsd.aegean.gr/courses/ICSD228/) and in the first presentation of the course.

Greek (English for Erasmus students)