Introduction to Multimedia. Historical perspective, 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 theory. Media representations and media formats: digital representation of images, aspect ratios, digital image formats, representation of digital video, types of video signals, YUV subsampling schemes, digital video formats, digital representation of audio, surround sound, spatial audio, commonly used audio formats. Color theory: trichromacity theory, color spaces. Multimedia compression: the need for compression, basics of information theory, lossless and lossy compression. Image compression: redundancy and relevancy of image data, lossless image coding, transform image coding, wavelet based coding. Video compression: general theory of video compression (temporal redundancy, block-based frame prediction, computing motion vectors, size of macroblocks), types of predictions, 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: modes of communication, multimedia communication standards and protocols.

It is the intent of this course (through appropriate classroom and laboratory experiences) that students will:

• understand the basic meanings concerning the representation, coding and transmission of multimedia data.
• know the digitization process for all media types, explaining the theoretical and practical details, issues in rendering on various display/sound devices, working of cameras, and formats of different media types.
• have skill of analyzing the individual features of the different multimedia data (e.g., image, video, audio), from its simplistic individual aspects to more complex content formed by the combinations, such as surround sound, spatial audio, composite video, and component video.
• understand the theoretical and practical limits of information compression and will be able to describe some compression techniques of various media types and the important compression standards.
• know about the distribution of compressed content and will be able to describe the fundamentals of digital communications.
• understand that an important issue for end clients is the steady and synchronized consumption of multimedia information in the presence of varying network throughput, jitter, and errors and know how such fluid throughput can be achieved. 7. know the principles and current technologies of multimedia systems.
• have skill of developing multimedia applications.

Not required.

1. Συστήματα Πολυμέσων: Αλγόριθμοι, Πρότυπα και Εφαρμογές, Havaldar P., Medioni G.
2. Τεχνολογία πολυμέσων και πολυμεσικές επικοινωνίες, Γεώργιος Β. Ξυλωμένος, Γεώργιος Κ. Πολύζος.

Lectures, resolving exercises, Laboratory Exercises.

Lectures, problem sessions, Lab exercises.

Face-to-face.