ECSAMIN project
The acronym ECSAMIN stands for (in French):
Étude et Conception d'un Système d'Accès Multirésolution aux Images Numériques.
It can be translated in English in the following way:
Study and design of a multiresolution access system to digital images.
ECSAMIN is a two-year development project sponsored by the regional
government of Wallonia (the southern part of Belgium), which started in
September 1994. Its main goal is to carry out a coder/decoder based on
hardware components. It is intended:
- To realize compression/decompression of still images
(B&W or coloured) through a propriatery algorithm based on multiresolution
analysis. It outperforms a lot the well-known JPEG algorithm.
- To provide both lossy and lossless compression.
- To offer scrambling possibilites to the author
for confidentiality.
- To assure authentication of both the image and the
author thanks to a signature algorithm.
- To provide the user with a multiresolution access to
the image even if it is passed through the three above-mentionned processes,
i.e. compression, scrambling and authentication. Multiresolution access
leaves the user with the possibility to recover the original image step
by step, starting from a small icon and adding the details progressively
until the full resolution is reached. The scrambling process authorizes
the author to limit access to given level of details.
- To evaluate the possibility to extend the method to real-time image
sequences.
To reach this goal, several hardware devices are going to be used:
- TMS320C40 processors;
- customized ASICS developed for multiresolution analysis/synthesis and
motion estimation at the
Microelectronics laboratory;
- FPGAs for entropy coding and cryptography.
This project lies on a collaboration between the
Telecommunications and
Remote Sensing and
Microelectonics
laboratories of the
Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). It involves several
scientists and PhD dissertation results.
The main applications that can be considered are in commercial image
databases, confidential medical imaging and videotelephony.
The executives of the two laboratories who are involved in this project
are:
People who participate to the project are:
To contact us:
Prof. Jean-Didier Legat
Microelectronics Laboratory
Bâtiment Maxwell
Place du Levant, 3
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
BELGIUM
Phone: +32 10 472568
Fax: +32 10 478667
Page: UCL
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September 26th, 1996
Author and contents: Jean-Yves Mertès
<Mertes@tele.ucl.ac.be>