Driven by the advances in artificial intelligence technologies, smart environments (or “pervasive computing”) already penetrate our daily lives. Distributed multimedia system is one of the most important components in many smart environments. As shown in the following figure, more and more smart homes, smart buildings, and public Utilities like hospitals, airports or universities will be equipped with billions of ubiquitous video/image acquisition devices. Combined with alerts driven by video analytics, for example, it is possible to check whether children have arrived home safely from school, and whether the patients have troubles and need help.

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However, with the increasing number of wireless video cameras in the local, the multimedia systems including video capturing, compression and transmission, are going to be challenged by the power efficiency. The multimedia learning and understanding technologies including the detection, tracking and recognition will be challenged by the accuracy and efficiency. Our laboratory focuses on the following research fields to develop an intelligent and efficient multimedia processing system: Image sensing, algorithm and hardware design of video compression, image processing (understanding and quality enhancing).