Vertical handoff is required to achieve anywhere and anytime internet access in the fourth generation (4G) network providing interoperability between universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) and wireless LAN (WLAN). However, video data can be lost due to latency caused by vertical handoff. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a video streaming technique supporting error concealment (EC) for video on demand (VOD) services that provides seamless playout at the client in vertical handoff. In the proposed method, the streaming server first predicts the client buffer status (CBS). Using the predicted CBS and the channel rate, the streaming server selects a proper video transmission method for vertical handoff between frame selective pre (FSP)-transmission and re-transmission. Performance evaluations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Video transcoding technique is an efficient mechanism to deliver visual contents to a variety of users who have different network conditions or terminal devices with different display capabilities. In this paper, we propose two types of transcoding methods for adapting the bitrate of streaming video to the bandwidth of the transmission channel; spatial resolution reduction (SRR) transcoding and temporal resolution reduction (TRR) transcoding. The two transcoding methods are alternatively operated according to the requirements of users. Experimental results show that the proposed transcoding methods can preserve image quality while transcoding to the low bitrate.

Although the Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems have been rapidly developed to protect copyrights, they have not considered user privacy because they regard this as an unnecessary element in achieving their goals. However, the protection of user privacy becomes one of the most important issues in DRM systems as the number of people who suffer from accidents caused by the infringement of individual information dramatically increases. This paper suggests a license management protocol which is a more powerful protocol to protect individual information in DRM. To protect the exposure of information of user identification, the proposed protocol uses alias like a TID and a token instead of the identity of content users. Due to using alias, this protocol can guarantee the anonymity of content users. Also, it can prevent the leakage of individual information through encryption of usage information. In this way, it can protect the privacy of content users.

We propose a new method for improving the recognition performance of phonemes, speech emotions, and music genres using multi-task learning. When tasks are closely related, multi-task learning can improve the performance of each task by learning common feature representation for all the tasks. However, the recognition tasks considered in this study demand different input signals of speech and music at different time scales, resulting in input features with different characteristics. In addition, a training dataset with multiple labels for all information sources is not available. Considering these issues, we conduct multi-task learning in a sequential training process using input features with a single label for one information source. A comparative evaluation confirms that the proposed method for multi-task learning provides higher performance for all recognition tasks than individual learning for each task as in conventional methods.

We propose a probing-based channel adaptive video streaming method to provide seamless video transmission over the wireless 3G network. In the proposed method, the available bandwidth (AB) of the end-to-end path is estimated by analyzing RTP packets at the streaming client and the network/client buffer status (NCBS) is predicted by examining the RTCP receiver report (RR) and the application defined packet (APP) including the AB information. Using the estimated AB, the NCBS, and the stored multirate bitstream information, the proposed streaming method determines the next transmission bitrate precisely. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can be effectively used for video streaming.