ENSC 424 - Multimedia Communications Engineering - Fall 2005

Acknowledgement  The information in this site was modified from the website for ENSC 424 - Fall 2003, which was created by the later ENSC Professor Jacques Vaisey.

Instructor

Professor        Jie Liang (Email: JieL at sfu dot ca)
Office:            ASB 9821   
Phone:           (604) 291-5484   
Office Hours:  Monday 11:00am-13:00pm or by appointments.

Teaching Assistant

Upul Samarawickrama (Email: usamaraw at sfu dot ca)
Office Hours:  Tue. 14:15 pm - 16:15 pm or by appointments.
Room:            TBA
Note:              The department currently experiences a major office shuffling . The current TA office room ASB 8805 will be moved to ASB 9846.8 from Sept 14, 2005. Please email
                        the TA in advance to confirm the TA room.

Lecture Schedules

Monday:         15:30-17:20,   AQ     4140
Wednesday:    16:30-17:20,  WMC 2532
No class on Monday Sept. 5 (Labor Day) and Monday Oct. 10 (Thanksgiving Day).

Course Policies

Interest Links

Lecture Notes

    Lecture Notes, Homeworks, reading materials.

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Course Description

The objective of this course is to provide students with important background in the engineering aspects of multimedia communications. We will address how to efficiently compress multimedia data, including image, video, speech, and audio, and how to deliver them over a variety of networks. In the coding aspect, basic compression technologies will be covered. A number of compression standards, such as JPEG, MPEG, H.263, MP3, and the next generation image coding standard JPEG 2000 and video coding standard H.264, will be analyzed. In the networking aspect, the architectures and protocols associated with multimedia communications networks will be introduced. These include TCP/IP, UDP, and RTP/RTCP. Special considerations for multimedia transmission, such as synchronization, quality of service, and error resilience, will be covered.

The best way to understand and appreciate an algorithm is to program it. Therefore, this course emphasizes computer assignments and projects. Students will be graded on a combination of assignments, tests and the final project. 

Prerequisites

ENSC 380 is a prerequisite for ENSC 424. In addition, a course like ENSC 327 would be an asset. Students should be familiar with the following concepts:
Besides, programming in MATLAB and C/C++ will be involved throughout this course.

Mailing List

The course will have a mailing list ensc-424@sfu.ca, which you will be able to use to send time-critical announcements to everyone in the class.

Important Dates:

  • First class:                  Wed. Sept. 7
  • Midterm:                    Mon. Oct. 31, 15:30-17:20, in AQ 4140 (tentative)
  • Project proposal due: Mon. Nov. 7 (tentative)
  • Project due:               Mon. Dec. 5 (tentative)
  • Last class:                  Mon. Dec. 5
  • Final exam:                TBA

    • Grading Policy

    Grading will be done according to the following scheme: This policy may be changed during the first week of classes.
    All exams are closed book and closed notes. Calculators and one page of letter-size (8.5 x 11 inch), hand-written and double-sided cheat sheet are allowed (No PDA and cell phones please). You must show all important work on an exam to receive full credit.

    Assignment Information

    There will be approximately 5 homework assignments in this course and they will be returned approximately two weeks after they are submitted. Depending upon the TA support provided by the Department, it is possible that only a randomly chose subset of the problems will be graded. Note that some important concepts will be covered only in the homework assignments. 

    Project Details

    Students are required to complete a course project, which should be summarized by a written report. The report should provide a critical review of a topic that relates to the subject material of this course and may contain results from your own computer simulations/implementations. The idea is for you to demonstrate a "critical understanding" of the material in your project area. Each report should be typed in a single-spaced format on 8.5x11 inch paper and a length of between 10 and 15 pages (including figures and tables) would be reasonable for a individual project. Should you decide to include computational results in your work, you must also supply me with documented source code.

    Depending on the scope of the final project, students may team up and work together. However, the maximum number of students in each group is Two (2). The report of a group project should clearly specify the contribution of each individual in the group.

    Your work will be graded on the basis of:

    Plagiarism Issues:

    Please review the following page on plagiarism when you work on your project:

    http://www.lib.sfu.ca/researchhelp/writing/plagiarism.htm

    Pay attention to the following forms of plagiarism:
        - Quoting material without proper use of quotation marks (even if otherwise cited appropriately)
        - Using art, graphs, illustrations, maps, statistics, photographs, etc. without complete and proper citation
        - Paraphrasing or summarizing information from a source without proper acknowledgment

    You should state clearly in your report whether you have used any source code from other people, and what modification you have made to improve it, if any.

    As in any other course, anyone caught cheating on the project report will receive an automatic F.

    The Text Books

    The main textbook for ENSC 424 will be:

    Syllabus

    The following is a brief synopsis of what will be covered in this course. Note that this material is still evolving.

    Lecture Notes

        Lecture Notes, Homeworks, reading materials.