A government-sponsored project has successfully developed technologies involving advanced information storage standards, which is more user-friendly to interactive media information receivers, the National Science Council announced yesterday.
Dozens of researchers from the Communication and Multimedia Laboratory at National Taiwan University (NTU) yesterday demonstrated their research results at a press conference held by the council.
By having only a digital image of a friend (the target), researchers said, a user can within seconds retrieve all digital pictures of the target from a database containing thousands of pictures by using powerful international-standard software developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).
MPEG developed the Emmy Award-winning software known as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, which are used in VCD and DVD format respectively, for information storage. MPEG-4 and MPEG-7, later versions which ensure a better media-storage performance, were accepted worldwide in 1998 and 2001.
MPEG-4 is applied in the fields of digital television, interactive graphics applications and interactive multimedia. It provides standardized technological elements that enable the integration of the production, distribution and content-access paradigms of the three fields.
According to Wu Ja-ling (
"Our new technologies aim to create a coordinate framework integrating both the service provider and receiver," Wu said.
Other results include software that edits TV news pieces into more concise segments, software making virtual sculptures and a scalable-coders application, which coordinate information transmission between a service provider and receivers.
Wu said that the university's achievements attracted several foreign firms at the MPEG-4 Industry Forum last year and this year.
Tsay Chung-biau (
NTU will officially host a public exhibition of all the research results next Monday at its Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering.
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