Subject: invitation

From: "LMM IIT" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 12:42:24 +0300

Invitation to Participate in a Research Project to Develop the Key Encoding Module under the MPEG-4 Video Coding Standard

The new content-oriented video coding standard MPEG-4 adopted in 1999 specifies formats for coding and combining video objects present in video sequences. MPEG-4 is expected to open the way for advanced 21-century digital video coding. This standard, however, does not specify the mechanism or the procedure for locating (segmenting) such objects in a video sequence based on their motion and/or color. This is a subject of active research in many laboratories worldwide.

The problem of spatiotemporal segmentation of video sequences is a priority subject in the Semantic Segmentation research project started at the end of 1997 and conducted by the Laboratory of Mathematical Methods, Institute of Information Technologies, Russian Research Center, Kurchatov Institute, Moscow. This project was supported by SAIT (Samsung Advances Institute of Technology), Korea.

This Laboratory has been doing work in the field of computer vision for two decades. Its researchers have fulfilled a number of projects in theoretical and applied computer vision, medical and industrial diagnostics, automatic form entry and processing, and target detection and recognition.

Working on the Semantic Segmentation project, our computer vision group has been able to find conclusive solutions to several important problems inherent in trying to decompose a video sequence into individual objects. We believe that we have correctly formulated the problems that need be tackled to come closer to extracting video objects from natural video sequences (like sports or drama).

The purpose of this invitation is to get additional financial support that will make it possible to expand the team of researchers working on the project and to obtain the results in a shorter period.

With the additional financial support of about $100,000 over a period of 1.5 to 2 years, we would be able to address and solve most of essential problems in spatiotemporal object segmentation and develop workable technologies for general purpose video sequences.

On your request, we would be ready to provide additional information including Demos on the work done at the previous stages of the Semantic Segmentation project and a detailed technical proposal for the future research.

A.P. Aleksandrov, 
Director of the Institute of Information Technologies. 
[email-masked]