It is a great pleasure to announce that the Ph.D. thesis of Benoit Pellan, that I supervised, is finally published and it is written in English. So don’t hesitate to download, read and comment it.

http://pastel.archives-ouvertes.fr/pastel-00579489/

In this dissertation, we propose to apply the concept of media scalability, as defined in hierarchical coding, to multimedia scenes which are the choreographers that organize several media into a visual and interactive presentation over time. As a consequence, an initial scene is progressively enhanced by successive transformations, that we call adaptation updates, in order to generate an appealing presentation which is compatible with the user’s context. Our approach, called Scalable MSTI, is built on three scalability axes that separate the Media and the Spatial, Temporal and Interactive properties of a multimedia scene. Each of these axes is composed of scalability layers that enclose adaptation updates. These scalability layers are organized according to an order relation based on the adaptation parameters selected by the editor to cope with envisioned user’s contexts. The presentation alternatives that are described in a scalable scene can be represented as a graph where an adaptation decision corresponds to the selection of a way along an adaptation path. Multimedia scene scalability has been applied to the digital radio domain by enabling the progressive playback of multimedia services on receivers. Additionally, the adaptation capabilities of scalable services would allow multimedia enhancements on wide-screen receivers or would avoid disabling the screen of multimedia car-radios while driving because of security regulations banning the display of animations.