The resource intensive nature of digital video processing makes the quality of multimedia presentations particularly sensitive to variations in resource availability. Hence, applications should adapt their resource requirements to the run-time environment, and thereby minimize the impact of resource scarcity on the perceptible quality of presentations. We have achieved these objectives by developing: (1) a library of reusable compression and image processing modules, and (2) a framework for dynamically composing these modules to create presentation processing engines (PPE). The three main benefits of our approach are: (1) the PPE implementation is configured at run time, and hence, can adapt to heterogeneous environments and changing resource availability; (2) substantial code reuse can be achieved by instantiating new algorithms using the same module implementations; and (3) the toolkit is inherently extensible, since new modules can be easily added to the library.

Representative Publication:

1. E.J. Posnak, R.G. Lavendar, and H.M. Vin, An Adaptive Framework for Developing Multimedia Software Components, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 40, No. 10, Pages 43-47, October 1997 [ Abstract | Paper ]

2. E.J. Posnak, R.G. Lavender, and H.M. Vin, Adaptive Configurations, In Proceedings of the 3rd Pattern Languages of Programming Conference, Monticello, Illinois, September 1996.
   [ Abstract | Paper ]