Visitor's Talk



Sliding-window digital fountain codes for multimedia applications

• Speaker: Enrico Magli, Politecnico di Torino (Italy)

• Abstract:
  Digital fountain codes have recently attracted a wide interest as a potential alternative to Reed-Solomon codes for data transmission over networks subject to packet losses. These codes are able to generate an infinite number of packets describing the source data; the receiver only needs to receive a sufficient number of any packets in order to carry out decoding. Their linear-time encoding and decoding complexity have made these codes very attractive, leading to their standardization into 3GPP MBMS and DVB-H.
  The talk will consist of two parts. In the first part, the characteristics and operation of the main digital fountain codes, i.e. LT and Raptor codes, will be reviewed; systematic Raptor codes will also be described, as well as the standardized R10 Raptor code. In the second part, sliding-window digital fountain codes will be presented. The sliding-window approach improves the performance of digital fountains, allowing them to operate with smaller overhead and smaller error probability. Moreover, it allows to carry out unequal error protection by weighting the source data differently during the generation of the parity checks. Simulation results will be presented for sliding-window LT and Raptor codes.

• Biographical Sketch:
  Dr. Enrico Magli is an Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Torino (Italy). His research interests are in the field of error-resilient image and video coding for wireless applications, joint source and channel coding, image and video security, and distributed source coding.
  He is an editorial board member of the EURASIP Journal on Information Security, and a member of the Multimedia Systems and Applications technical committee of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He has been a member of the Italian delegation to the ISO (SC 29 WG 1 - JPEG), actively contributing to the JPEG standardization activities; he has been co-editor of JPEG 2000 Part 11 (Wireless JPEG 2000).
  Dr. Magli has been TPC member for several international conferences, including IEEE ICASSP, ICME, ICIP, MMSP, IIH-MSP, and has been session chair at several conferences. He has coauthored more than 100 scientific papers in international journals and conferences, has organized special sessions in the field of multimedia at IEEE IIH-MSP 2006 and IEEE ISCAS 2007, is TCP co-chair of the IMAP 2007 conference, and is acting as guest co-editor for a special issue of Eurasip JIS.