Home ] Homework ] Outlines ] Calendar ] VAB Labs ] [ Web Links I ] Web Links II ] Contacts ]

Links supporting Chapters 0-9 of
"Multimedia & Information Engineering" from Prentice Hall

Links for Chapters 10-18 @ Web Links II

Engineering 
Process
Digital
Instruments
Digitizing Your World

Engineering
as Career

Digital Imaging Communication Systems
Teaching Engineering Computer Animation Networks & Internet
Engineering 
Resources
Cool Image Processing Compression
Digital Music  Digital Imaging 
in Space
    
Information Theory

The Engineering Process

[Top]

Engineering: As a career

  •  Engineering Your Future - Percolate Site
    The American Society for Engineering Education lays out how students can get on track for engineering at college. A very well-done site.

  • Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
    The largest professional organization in the world. A meeting point for electrical engineers from all branches of the field.

  • The Scholastic Assessment Test
    A great opportunity for building a base for a great career in engineering or pother fields. Contact your teacher and school academic counselor for details on this examination. A college education is as essential as a good primary education for an engineer. For more sites and information, check out the search for "SAT" on Google.

  • The Electrical Engineer
    A site explaining the basics to become an electrical engineer. Engineering is not only for the nerds, it can be very exciting as well!

  • The College Board
    A list of colleges offering undergraduate programs in engineering and technology.

  • ABET Home
    The Accreditation Board for Engineering & Technology is the gate-keeper for the accreditation of some 2400 universities in the US.

[Top]

Teaching Engineering

[Top]

Engineering Resources

[Top]

Digital Music

  • Music and Computers at Dartmouth
    The Electro-Acoustic College at Dartmouth has a course on Digital Audio. This is their table of contents with some nice applets and illustrations of some of the ways music can be made by computers. Additive Synthesis is discussed in some detail.

  • Princeton Sound Lab
    Home of some of the pioneering work on speech synthesis and physical modeling of sound, there are some great projects going on here.

  • Fourier Synthesis
    A fantastic Java Applet that quickly allows you to see how varying amplitudes and phases of sines and cosines can be combined to form a variety of complex signals. It behaves much like sketch wave in VAB and allows you to here what you've just created. The quantization button allows you to watch digitization in action.

  • Mathematics Archives -  Fourier Analysis & Wavelet Demonstrations.
    This extensive page has over 20 links to various applets and information on this basic function of signal processing.

  • JFK Assassination Dallas Police Tapes
    History in real time. These tapes are still being analyzed with DSP's to attempt to tease out new information. 

  • MTEC-111 Introduction to Music Technology Sample Questions
    An on-line self-test that includes some of the terms from Chapters 2 & 3. 

  • Alexander Graham Bell, Ph.D.: "On the Production and Reproduction of Sound by Light"
    An overview of the optical encoding of sound in October 1880 as written by the great inventor himself. We had to wait till 1929 to finally hear movies however.

  • Nyquist Sampling theorem
    A fundamental concept in signal processing is determining how much bandwidth you need to accurately reproduce a signal, like the human voice. It turns out that you need at least twice the maximum frequency of a signal with an upper and lower set of limits.

  • Phasor Phactory
    This superb java applet from John Hopkins allows you to create sinusoids, square, triangle, sawtooth, and many other basic waveforms using a clean interface.

  • Additive Synthesis in polyphonic cell phones
    Nokia, Samsung, and other 3-G cell phone manufacturers are using near MP3 quality sound features as marketing tools to get the cutting-edge adopters (read "you") to purchase a new phone and stay online. These profitable online ventures include gaming, music downloads, and other features not possible before. How waveform synthesis tricks are used to create a symphony of ringtones can be explored at:
    > 16 tone polyphonic details in the Samsung SGH-N620 (Flash app) under "16 Poly". Here you can listen to 1, 4, 8, and 16 polyphonic samples.
    > Nokia's polyphonic music page
    > SMAF multimedia polyphonic music file format
    for cell phones uses less space than MIDI (!) and allows sync with video and images. This is Yamaha's homepage for developers. Learn how to create auditory sculptures that can soothe the savage beast or disrupt an entire auditorium in a moment :-).
  • Spectrogram usages: bird identification in the wild
    This Adobe Acrobat .PDF file gives a biologist's intro to spectrum analysis. A different approach to audio processing!

  • Underwater Recordings - Cetacean Research Technology
    MP3's of Orca whales off the Washington coast. The home page lists specialized spectral analysis tools for marine biologists.

  • Wildlife Sounds Page
    Doug Von Gausig has compiled all sorts of .wav files you can analyze in VAB's spectrogram tool.

  • Anabat Analysis Tool for Bat Sounds
    This spectrum analyzer is used to record ultrasonic bat signals and later process them with the Anabat software created in Queensland, Australia. This tool is rapidly becoming a standard inventory tool for wildlife biologists interested in monitoring bat populations.

  • Bat Detectors Homepage at Leeds University
    A general overview of how EE's have helped create specialized tools for bat echolocation analysis. Heterodyning, Frequency Division, and Time-expansion techniques are all discussed. Various ultrasonic transducers and commercial systems are compared. Places to get parts in order to build your own ultrasonic transducer are included.

  • Spectrogram Shareware from Richard Horne
    If you want to change spectrogram axis settings, color intensity, or tweak anything you wish, this great shareware program will do it for you. Limited to a ten minute run-time before your register, this spectrogram is by far the most robust and easy-to-use of the spectrogram program's we've used in class. Know you can really figure out what is hidden in the "pumpkin.wav" sound file!

[Top]

Digital Instruments

[Top]

Digital Imaging

  • Kodak Digital Imaging Tutorial
    A comprehensive coverage of all the topics we cover in the Infinity curriculum by Kodak. It even has multiple choice questions at the end of each module.

  • Cornell University Tutorial
    A slightly higher level tutorial.

  • Matrix Multiplication Demonstration
    If this topic is too hard to understand then just watch these matrices reshuffle and do the math in real-time animations.

  • Matrix and Quaternion FAQ
    Basic introduction to the math of matrices used to describe images.

  • Matrix operations primer
    An introduction to Python language programming shows how images can be rotated, sheared, and otherwise transformed.

  • Matrices for game developers
    This pdf file is a brief tutorial outline of how to use transformation matrices can be used to allow games to be developed.

  • Interactive Illustrations of Color Perception
    A Brown University research project aimed at designing better interfaces for computing. Take the survey of how you perceive the color patterns.

  • Art & science: how the brain processes imagery
    > Impressionism and visual processing
    - Harvard's Focus News
    > da Vinci to Monet- artist's take advantage of the brain's visual processing system.

  • Color theory explained
    Handprint.com does a very thorough job explaining color and the nature of the visual system. A very easy to follow tutorial.

  • YUV color format
    RGB isn't the only way to describe an image. Other codes have been adopted to serve different needs- like television transmission. The "YUV" format is used in Europe (YIQ is used in U.S. TV broadcasts.)  "The Y component of YUV is not "yellow" but luminance. Only the Y component of a color TV signal is shown on black-and-white TVs.   The chromaticity information is encoded in the U and V components. Instead of storing an image as 8 bits of red, 8 bits of green and 8 bits of blue per pixel, an RGB color image can be reduced to 16 bits per pixel by conversion to luminance and color differences."

  • Squant color spoof
    A little humor for those web designers who have to worry about RGB color outputs. Have you had your monitor squant-corrected yet?

  • Ohio State Tutorial
    An introductory course in digital image processing. A good revision for the students.

  • ABCNEWS.com: VinylVideo Puts Images on LPs
    How to use the analog technology of vinyl to store images? A reinvention of the audio "wheel" that is so retro it's on the cutting edge.

  • Face scanning software
    Faces at the super bowl were scanned with image processing software to try and ID felons in the crowd. An invasion of privacy or a new tool in the fight against crime? We'll need to decide soon.
  • Improving image transmission by adding analog noise
    Researchers have devised a way to encode and transmit image information directly as analog optical signals into optical fibers. They can make this signal more resistant to degradation or becoming hopelessly confused with other signals by doing what may seem counter-intuitive: adding more noise to the signal!
  • Jamming hand-held camcorders in movie theatres
    Now that you know about sampling rates and aliasing in signals, how might you be able to use the difference in sampling rates of the human retina and a silicon retina (the camcorder) to prevent movie piracy? Take a look at this system being evaluated for keeping the first-run movies off the net days after they hit theatres.

 > Imaging Hardware Tutorials for Chapter 18

[Top]

Computer animation

You will need the Macromedia Flash player for most of these media rich sites.
  • BitStreams
    The Whitney Museum's Flash-intensive site that explores the nature of digital art. A fascinating experience.

  • Vertex Blending for Lifelike Poses
    Ever wonder how digital joints have gotten to appear so seamless when different parts that have to be connected together and move in the same worldspace? ATI's Hardware Technical web site gives some details on how gamers can literally keep their shirts on in first-person games.

  • Pixar Animation Studios
    A true pioneer in computer graphics and animation! See trailers of brand new animation movies. The How We Do It section describes the 14 stages a movie moves through from start to finish.

  • Synthetic Actors Guild
    This LA Times article discusses something that Hollywood will be facing soon enough- how do you make completely digital actors and what sort of perks do they get on the set?
  • Industrial Light and Magic
    A studio that came out of the Star Wars movie. These were the guys who developed the animation for T2! The Toolbox has some updates on the latest from their bag of tricks. You'll need to register to view their latest short movies.

  • The Matrix
    Enter the construct! The Matrix was a revolution in movie making. An excellent example of technology taking a giant leap forward. Take the red pill- the geek in you will love this site. The Bullet time walk-through page describes how this SFX was created.

  • Geometry algorithms
    How to use these vector processing tools to describe and manipulate 3-D space

  • Final Fantasy: The Technology Within
    This multi-part interview describes the polygon meshes, lighting, and hair modeling required for this epic CG movie.

  • WETA Digital
    The folks of WETA put together the Academy Award winning special effects for the movie trilogy "The Lord of the Rings". Flash is required.

  • Giant Studios Image Capture
    How do you digitize real life actors and 3-D objects in order to create thousand-orc armies on the screen? The state-of-the art laser scanning stuff is all here. Will we all have digital copies or avatars in the future? Flash required.

  • MASSIVE AI software overview.
    So now you have your thousand-orc army. How do you get them to fight, move, and interact without modeling every creature individually at 30 frames per second? Give them intelligence of a sort by using Artificial Intelligence algorithms to automate the process. WETA developed the MASSIVE software program to help create the spectacular fight scenes in the L.O.R. movies II and III. Intelligent agents such as these will steadily become more and more a part of the daily fabric of life in the 21st century. This Popular Science web article describes how it's done.

[Top]

Cool Image Processing

  • Digital Image Morphing
    A cool demo of digital morphing. Achtung! Site takes a while to load completely.

  • Noise in Images
    See the effect of noise addition in images.

  • Iterative Noise Removal
    An advanced iterative technique to remove structured noise in images.

  • Image Smoothing
    A technique for impulse noise removal. Shows a sequence of noisy images as they are cleaned up.
  • Image Processing Bench
    How to achieve lots of cool image processing tricks by using computer programming. Some free downloads will allow you to achieve these same effects within a simple interface.
  • Image Segmentation
    UC Santa Barbara's Imaging Processing and Vision Research lab has some nice segmentation illustrations shown here. A necessary step towards machine identification of an object.
  • Bio-image Informatics
    If image processing can allow machine vision, why not apply these techniques to image libraries of cell structures so the identification process can be automated? UCSB and other universities are sharing a grant to develop methods to mine data from such image banks.

[Top]

Mojoworld: Fractal
Planetary Modeler

  • Pandromeda Home page
    The source of the free download, Mojoworld Transporter, that will literally open up new worlds of possibility for 3-D real-time modeling.
  • fractional Brownian Motion (fBM)
    The heart of many common fractal effects, this advanced procedural texturing, this Intel tutorial discusses the NOISE function used in Mojoworld. A little noise in an image can be a good thing!
  • Ken Perlin's lecture on the above topic of NOISE!
    How is noise like a little salt in the soup? How can you model fur? This set of slides and commentary from the man who is now working for ILM and George Lucas is a nice intro to creating pseudorandmoness in fractals.
  • Animated Waves on Mojoworld
    Swiss programmer Bernard Krummenacher has created some amazing animations of wave motions using Mojoworld. A sample of what is to come!
  • Tutorial for using the Mojoworld Generator software
    A step-by-step guide to building your own planet using the various procedural texture editors in the program.

Digital Imaging in Space

  • The Hubble Telescope
    Digital techniques allowed crystal clear images from the Hubble to be obtained by laboratories spread throughout the world. Here are some beautiful images captured by the Hubble.

  • Spy Satellites
    Images captured by spy satellites allow the US government to keep a watchful eye on the rest of the world. Without CCD cameras and digital transmission of images, real-time supervision would be impossible. This BBC site outlines their uses in Afghanistan.

  • Satellite Images
    Have fun finding your house!

  • The Search For Asteroids Procedure
    A slightly more serious use of image processing to look for the sorts of rocks that the movie Armageddon was written about.

  • Chandra X-ray Observatory
    Digital images can be captured in the x-ray spectrum as well. Most of the radiation from space lies in this band and hence the Chandra x-ray observatory project gains so much significance. Just check out the pictures on the site, simply breathtaking!

[Top]

Digitizing Your World

[Top]

Communication Systems

[Top]

Networks & the Internet

  • CS 105 The Web: Technologies and Techniques
    This Williams College Computer Science Course overlaps with much of Infinity Chapters 7 & 8. The Digital Transmission lecture notes are worth the visit.
  • Hobbes' Internet Timeline
    A veritable mine of information listing places and people instrumental in developing technology for the web. A true inspiration for the budding engineer.
  • PBS History of the Internet
    A concise overview of the major events.
  • Short History of the Internet by Bruce Sterling
    Tired of the jargon engineers can become immersed in? Read this very literate article about how the internet was developed.
  • Cisco
    Do you know how actually this giant was born? It was in a small apartment way back in 1984. Just two decades later it is a virtual monopoly for routers, the backbone gatekeepers of the web. This is their product documentation web site.
  • How do routers work?
    Marshall Brain's How Stuff Work's examines this specialized computer that is at the heart of the internet's ability to connect.
  • Computer Networks and Internets
    Douglas Comer at Purdue has an excellent web site to accompany his book. The animations of networking protocols and multiplexing are worth the visit.
  • Call routing in telephone networks
    Another superb site illustrating math applications from the PLUS web site in the UK. Algorithms to make efficient network connections are illustrated.
  • Video on "Warriors of the .Net" 
    Great intro to the Internet. A large (73MB!) video that you shouldn't try to downloaded under 56K conditions!
  • Visually tracing your data packets
    Want to see how routers send your data packets from point A to point B via the fiber-optic nervous system of the internet? Take a look at this free demo (a java applet) from Visualware.com that will map the geographic connections between routers on the internet. Type in your school's web site and see where your data "hops". The quickest route between two computers isn't always the shortest one if there is congestion!
  • Internet 2 Project
    Imagine a fiber optics backbone with a bandwidth so large as to accommodate several million simultaneous users at fast speeds. This Yahoo page has several links to this research project between academia and high-tech companies.
  • The Abilene Project
    Named for the Kansas railhead connecting to the wide-open spaces of the high prairie, this academic and company consortium is creating and testing the widest fiber based "pipe" possible for internet communications. Initially running at 2.4 Gigabits per second, it will ramp up to near 10 Gbps using next generation routers and protocols. What can you do with bandwidth like that? The question is- what can't you do?
  • Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)
    When you view this web page you're using IPv4, which is nearly 20 year old. The number of IP addresses, much like phone numbers in an area, are a finite resource that will eventually be consumed by the ever burgeoning number of internet connected devices. The answer to more needing more phone numbers for cell phones was to add more area codes, even if you're calling your neighbor across the street. IPv6 not only adds more "area codes" but also improves how routers and other vital components communicate with each other. The Internet 2 will use IPv6. The specifics of  IPv6 can be found here.
  • Using the Internet 2 in a K-12 environment
    What sort of "middle ware" will allow the students of the future to communicate with the massive bandwidth of the Internet 2? This initiative explores some of the issues that will need to be addressed.
  • Defense Science Study Group -Future Network Threats
    What sorts of threats might the information nervous system of the US face in a connected world? The NIPC is proposed in this study.
  • U.S.'s Defenseless Department
    Why didn't the NIPC work well in it's first two years? Read this Wired report about how turf wars, lack of leadership, and other bureaucratic issues had crippled the NIPC. 
  • NIPC in a post 9-11 environment
    Now a major component of Homeland Security, NIPC has the impetus and funding necessary to watch over America's cybernetic infrastructure.
  • Military to use packetized communications 4/03
    Laser communications between military satellite constellations and broadband communications for US forces will require a switch to packetized instead of switched data. Think of it as a High Frontier Internet or Broadband for the Battlefield.
  • Reading Email Headers
    The Stopspam.org web site details how to tell where your email originated and how it was transmitted over the Net.

[Top]

Compression of Data

  • Adam's Multimedia Tutorial-compression
    Though several years old, this WebMonkey overview of audio and video codec's (compression + decompression algorithms) used by Realplayer, Flash, and other streaming technologies is clear.
  • Data Compression
    A web site devoted to the principles and practice of data compression. Includes a discussion on data compression in speech (with a good "demo"), images, and a Huffman tutorial under " fundamental algorithms".

  • Compression Basics @ HowStuffWorks: Several pages going through the basics of lossy and lossless compression.

  • Lossless Data Compression
    A site designed for an introduction to the various data compression algorithms used today. Great hands-on demos!

  • JPEG graphics compression format
    This common web graphics format is based on the "Joint Photographic Experts Group" specifications. Below are several sites aimed at different audiences that explain how and what this .jpg extension is about:
    > The JPEG File: A quick non-technical guide with various image qualities shown
    > JPEG image compression FAQ: A thorough discussion of the JPEG standard and when to use this in web design.
    > Myths and Facts about JPEG graphics: This about.com page explores some of the misconceptions about .jpg's.

  • Compression Pointers
    Books and links at internz.com from A-Z. Very thorough list of the people and topics in this field.

  • Dr. Ross's Compression Crypt
    A legend in the data compression field, Ross Williams has a unique site that shows a sense of humor and love of old horror movies. 

  • Software to unzip identity of unknown composers
    How can lossless compression utilities like Winzip help identify the composer of a musical score? By creating compression via run-length coding, such software finds and groups similar coding blocks into symbols requiring fewer bits. If composers, like authors, have patterns to their scores that act as fingerprints, then the compression tools can quickly find such bit patterns.

  • Webreview.com - How Voice Processing Will Change the Web 
     An overview of how signal processing of speech will change our interactions with not only the computer, but also our relationships in a connected  world.

  • MP3 audio format compression cycle: An overview of how an MP3 is "ripped" from a CD audio file.

  • MP3 format and the Huffman coding inside it: This overview discusses the psychoacoustic model of compression found within an MP3.

  • CNN.com - Technology - Meet the men behind the MP3 format 
    This May 2000 article is a brief summary of the MP3 tool.

  • Brief Wavelet Overview
    If you can sort a song's frequency components using a Fourier Transform and group and rank their relative frequencies to produce the Huffman coding tree, why not do something similar to an image? Wavelets (composed of many small waves) are the latest and greatest compression technique that is making a major impact on the imaging applications you run into every day. An image can be decomposed row by row and then column by column into many different visual frequencies to create a much smaller small data set. Catch the "motherwave"!

  • Beyond Discovery: "Wavelets: Seeing the Forest and the Trees"
    The National Academies of Science creates feature articles for how applications, such as compression. develop from basic research. This article tracks wavelet analysis tools from their creation in the hunt for oil, to basic mathematical research into their validity, and then on to the applications in such movies as  "A Bug's Life". A wonderfully comprehensive web site!
  • The FBI Fingerprint Image Compression Standard: Chris Brown outlines how the FBI solves the common issue with graphics files: limited bandwidth and storage. Both JPEG and wavelet compressions are examined.
  • JPEG2000 compression standard
    Using lossy and lossless wavelet compression techniques, this new image format will achieve 200 to 1 compression for the lossy compression and 2 to 1 for the lossless techniques. The quality of these smaller files (.jp2) far outstrips the current .jpg image standard you see on the web all of the time. The .jp2 standard allows for "regions of interest" to retain detail while the  background data has a lower quality.
  • Satellite imagery and mapping is a natural for wavelet compression
    Mapping Science, Inc. is a Seattle-based software firm that has created .jp2 plug-in's for use with geographical information system (GIS) data.
  • The Wavelet Tutorial Part I 
    Robi Polkar's introduction to a new algorithm that uses fractal-like redundancies to do extreme compressions on signals.
  • Wavelet Java applets @ Rice
    The DSP group at Rice has lots of MatLab code for wavelets and some graphical applets for seeing this advanced technique at work over time. Upper level undergraduate college material!
  • Microsoft research paper on time-compression methods 
    Microsoft's research center has numerous on-line publications about cutting-edge investigations into human-computer interfaces. Written for the educated layman, these word documents make great references for reports. 

[Top]

Information Theory

  • Bell Labs Intro to Information Theory
    The best introduction to this field and how it relates to electronics and networks.
    > An excellent site!
  • Comms pioneer Claude Shannon dead at 84
    Obituary (2/01) of the man who established Information Theory as a discipline in 1948. One of the founders of modern computer science, he was also well known for unicycle riding at the Bell Labs where he worked.
  • RIP Claude Shannon
    This UK site has a brief tribute and some good links to the pioneer who made modern digital communications possible.
  • Biography of Claude Shannon
    As part of an award winning documentary, UCSD film makers have place a fairly comprehensive overview of Shannon's life and work on this site. The documentary is also available in streaming video format.
  • As We May Think- Vannevar Bush
    This famous 1945 Atlantic Monthly article was uncanny in its predictions of where science and technology might lead as America emerged from WWII. The conceptual underpinnings for the Internet are laid out here. 
  • Google's Information Theory Listings
    The former Stanford folks who founded my favorite web search engine have tipped their hats to this great discipline and have collected the best links within this vital field. The number of topics that Shannon's theories impact upon are found throughout science, mathematics, and engineering.
  • Claude Shannon & Information theory: a 1999 sophomore paper
    A nice overview of the key points in web format done for a Stanford class project.
  • Information Theory Introduction
    This Cambridge professor's lectures outlines the field of Information Theory as of 1995. Written for college seniors and grad students.

[Top]

Back Home Next

IOngineering @ St. Mark's School of Texas
Web Page last updated 02/24/04
Copyright � 2001 All rights reserved
Webmaster: Doug Rummel