Completion of the VICCI project – Part 2

The ESF-funded junior research group VICCI dealt from 2012 until the end of 2014 with the development, control and integration of cyber physical systems (CPS) at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Dresden University of Technology. The scope includes smart home environments and supporting people in the ambient assisted living.

Today, I am writing about Visualization in heterogeneous and distributed infrastructure. Well, this sounds more advanced than it is. Is simply is about remote visualization.

A first prototype for compressed video transfer was successfully integrated in a collaboration project with the HZDR Dresden by a co-advised student project. This work was presented on the international conferences SuperComputing 2013 (Denver) and 2014 (New Orleans). Both presentations focused on the PIConGPU research project by the HZDR, was an ACM Gordon Bell Finalist at the SC2013. This shows the clear applicability of our approach.

The video transfer, being the crucial part of the whole approach, was extended by multiple different compression techniques. In addition and worth a special mention is the bachelor thesis of Christoph Träger, which aimed at latency masking via image interpolation and extrapolation at the displaying thin client.

The core idea is latency masking via image interpolation on the display device. Based on the original image (left) the target image (center) is approximated. Re-projection of the image data allows for this approximation (right).

The prototypical software component for the video transfer is called RIV. The current state of the project can be downloaded from the VICCI website.

The implementation of the image interpolation for latency masking can be downloaded from the website of the bachelor thesis of Christoph Träger. Important: all rights on that source code remain with Christoph Träger! The source code presented there may only be used for teaching and research. Any further use requires the consent of the original author. The TU Dresden has the right for additional use of the source code.