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Multimedia Systems

About this course

Welcome to the online course of Multimedia Systems. My name is Attila Varga, I work as a senior lecturer at the Department of Automation and Info-communication, at the Institute of Electrical Engineering, at the University of Miskolc. The training programme and lessons of this subject has been worked out by my colleague, László Czap and me.

We are always surprised and delighted to see the amazing worlds in movies. Realistic objects, magical worlds, mystical characters can be seen there, however, they often do not exist in the reality. At an early stage, three-dimensional models were used to replace the stage sets. You may ask why is it. Well the answer is simple. Namely, creating virtual models is cheaper than building a complete scenery. At the cinema, we can see virtual creatures made by the creators’ imagination. Just think of Harry Potter, Star Wars, Avatar and so on. 3D modelling and animation are now at an advanced stage that enables to display digitally created people in virtual worlds. Let’s take the movie Gladiator as an example. Oliver Reed, one of the main characters died, during making the film. Since the film had to be finished, several of his scenes had to be completed using computer generated virtual model of him. The audience did not realize difference between scenes created by the real actor and the virtual model of him. Actually, digital technologies opened the door to make movies starring dead actors. For example, 3d model of Marilyn Monroe has already been created for a long time ago, as a result, movies starring her can be easily made.

The subject multimedia systems gives a great insight into the processing of sounds, still images and videos, as well as into the basis of 3d modelling. Before going into the details of image processing, characteristics of human vision are described in the first lessons, especially so as to learn to trick your eyes. Getting to know the colour systems is necessary to process and compress images. Any types of transformations are performed in order to improve images or to prepare them for further operations, such as shape recognition and measurement.

The subject multimedia systems provides exciting lessons covering modern, up-to-date sound, image and video processing technologies and applications. We hope that this course is not only useful, but also fun for you.