FP7 ICT CONCERTO

Date:

2011-2015

Themes:

Channel coding, Multimedia Source Compression, Software Defined Radio

Funding:

EUFP7

FP7 ICT CONCERTO (Content and cOntext aware delivery for iNteraCtive multimedia healthcaRe applications) is a STREP project in the EU's Seventh Framework Programme aiming at designing and validating several critical building blocks of telemedicine applications. These include network-aware applications that rely on content-aware codecs and storage formats, carried over an application-aware network. The ultimate aim of FP7 ICT CONCERTO is to provide high a Quality of Experience (QoE) for medics, which is a necessary condition for providing flawless medical diagnosing of the highest reliability.

CONCERTO will achieve this ambitious goal by the joint optimization of several tightly coupled system components, which form an organic ensemble, rather than a simple interconnected conglomerate. The ‘conductor of the CONCERTO’ relies on its advanced signaling system, which will support the real-time end-to-end adaptation of the constituent blocks designed for efficiently conveying the medical signals and video streams, potentially emanating from multiple, uncorrelated and rapidly moving sources. The ‘players’ are from leading-edge companies, universities and research centers with a proven experience and key positions spanning from video coding to wireless communications, collaborating with doctors and medical staff of the hospital of Perugia (participating as University of Perugia).

The CONCERTO applications will be designed to optimize these delicate multimedia transmission sessions through constant monitoring of the current network conditions. The proposed approach includes the adaptation of the encoding parameters at the source, but also the fusion of multiple objects/stream, in order to reduce the amount of redundancy in case of high tele-traffic demands aggravated by the paucity of network resources.

FP7 ICT CONCERTO will develop advanced algorithms and codecs to improve the compression as well as the protection and transmission of 3D medical image sets complemented by multi-view, stereoscopic and holographic video. High-quality near-capacity lossless and near-lossless coding schemes will be employed, which are capable of handling diverse storage formats supporting interactive control, including progressive download and streaming, just to mention a few.

From a network point of view, FP7 ICT CONCERTO will take into account media caching assisted content-aware wireless delivery (e.g., over LTE / LTE Advanced networks). The particular objectives include the optimization of LTE uplink and downlink transmissions for video delivery, considering all relevant variables (e.g., distance from base station, power adaptation, traffic priority, etc.) and decision techniques (e.g., scheduling and resource allocation).

Primary investigators

• Soon Ng
• Lajos Hanzo

Secondary investigator

• Zunaira Babar

Partners

• Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME)
• ICT Centre of Excellence for Research, Innovation, Education & industrial Labs (CEFRIEL)
• National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT)
• Kingston University (KU)
• NEC Technologies (NEC)
• SIEMENS AG (SIEMENS)
• Thales Communications and Security (TCS)
• University of Perugia (UOP)
• Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT)

Associated research group

• Communications, Signal Processing and Control