Digital video recorder (DVR) systems are novel security products with significant potential for application in the surveillance market, which, like many other areas of security technology, is changing quickly. Consumer demand and procuring budgets of system development firms are increasingly being emphasized, motivating upgrades to system quality. Digital surveillance systems include both hardw...

Cool products deliver a leap of value – so much so that people exclaim they are “cool”. Cool products are transformative but cool can fade with time as people get used to them. Compared to other measures, the cool measures are assumed to be more subjective and qualitative in nature. Cool is being redefined all the time; what is cool today will probably not be cool in a few years. In extensive r...

In video-on-demand (VOD) applications, it is desirable to provide the user with the video-cassette-recorder-like (VCR) capabilities such as fast-forwarding a video or jumping to a specific frame. We address this issue in the broadcast framework, where each video is broadcast repeatedly on the network. Existing techniques rely on data prefetching as the mechanism to provide this functionality. T...

Watermarks allow embedded signals to be extracted from audio and video content for a variety of purposes. One application is for copyright control, where it is envisaged that digital video recorders will not permit the recording of content that is watermarked as “never copy”. In such a scenario, it is important that the watermark survive both normal signal transformations and attempts to remove...

Modeling and optimization techniques for digital video communication