Optivision (United States)

Modern video games employ a variety of sophisticated algorithms to produce groundbreaking 3D rendering pushing the visual boundaries and interactive experience of rich environments. This course brings state-of-the-art and production-proven rendering techniques for fast, interactive rendering of complex and engaging virtual worlds of video games.

Scalable video coding has been an interesting research topic for a long time. Temporal, spatial, and SNR scalabilities have been studied over the years. As network video applications are taking off, there is a great need for scalable video with fine granularity that the previous scalable coding schemes cannot satisfy. This paper presents the reference technique for fine granularity scalability in MPEG-4, which will satisfy the need of many network video applications.

This paper addresses the issue of inserting WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) and amplifier technologies into optical networks from network system architecture and application perspectives. In order to facilitate technology transfer into commercial applications, we need to carefully consider where we can insert the technologies, how we should utilize the technologies, and what are the benefits of employing these technologies. Through years' of investigation and development, taking into considerations of optical network environment, benefits of the technologies and implementation feasibility, we believe that there are three major roles that WDM and amplifier technologies can play in optical networks: point-to-point transmission for capacity expansion, in-fiber out-of-band control for format transparency, and optical routing for network efficiency. In this paper, we will describe each of these roles and their benefits. Progress and results of our related research programs, including optical crossbar switch testbed, will be reported.

Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) have a number of attractive properties for use in photonic switches. SOAs offer nanosecond switching times, extinction ratios in excess of 40 dB, and small signal gains of approximately 15 dB. In addition they can be monolithically integrated, and thus can potentially be fabricated in volume and used in large switch matrices. Here we report on our recent demonstration of an 8×8 optical crossbar switch based upon discrete SOAs. Other authors [1-3] have reported on SOA-based optical switches at the device level. Our work focuses on the demonstration of the technology at the system level. This demonstration is a significant step towards the widespread use of SOA-based optical switches because it provides a testbed for exploring and identifying the relationships between device parameters and system performance requirements. A block diagram of the optical crossbar switch is shown in Figure 1. The switch is constructed in a modular fashion and consists of optical, digital, analog, and computer modules. Figure 2 shows a photograph of the completed optical crossbar switch.

This paper describes an image compression engine that is valuable for compressing virtually all types of images that occur in a personal computer environment. This allows efficient handling of still frame video images (monochrome or color) as well as documents and graphics (black-and-white or color) for archival and transmission applications. Through software control different image sizes, bit depths, and choices between lossless compression, high speed compression and controlled error compression are allowed. Having integrated a diverse set of compression algorithms on a single board, the device is suitable for a multitude of picture archival and communication (PAC) applications including medical imaging, electronic publishing, prepress imaging, document processing, law enforcement and forensic imaging.