Demonstrating image communication within open distributed environments

Abstract

A wide variety of image interchange and communication (de facto) standards are employed today in different systems, applications and environments. Within the AMICS project a framework, called the Image Communication Open Architecture(ICOA), was defined to enable the various standards and standardization activities in the broad area of imaging and image communication to be related and the necessary support tools to be identified. Based on the ICOA, software tools to support the framework were developed focusing on different requirements for image communication. One requirement was perceived to underlie all the others, that of providing uniform access to whole images and parts of images whether they are stored locally or remotely. Such uniform access is provided through the ICOA Image Handling Interface (IHI). The IHI is realized by means of the ICOA Image Handler that is modelled as an Open Distributed Processing (ODP) object. The Image Handler encompasses the support of various compression schemes and (image) data formats, as well as different conversion facilities.

To demonstrate the concepts of the ICOA and the ICOA Software Tools, a remote teaching scenario was chosen. The teaching scenario illustrates the accessibility of any image storage with any kind of digital image format on it within a multimedia communication environment. The access to the media is provided by a multimedia communication service. Within this service, the Image Handler is used to retrieve still and moving images and those parts of audio-visual information that are covered by the ICOA.

The work has been performed within the RACE II project Advanced Multimedia and Image Communication Services (AMICS) (R2056) partially supported by the Commission of the European Communities (CEC).