SYNCHRONIZED DISTRIBUTION FRAMEWORK FOR HIGH-QUALITY MULTI-MODAL INTERACTIVE TELEIMMERSION BY

This dissertation investigates issues of performing synchronized distribution of time-correlated multi-modal continuous media data in the distributed interactive teleimmersion, and proposes approaches to solve these problems. The current best-effort shared Internet is unreliable in supporting bandwidth-savvy multimedia streaming, and frequent network jitter can contribute to the heterogeneity of distribution latencies (a.k.a., synchronization skews) within and across the multi-source sensory streams over time. The system limita-tions and computation constraints at the end devices can also prohibit the multimedia data in preserving the synchronization dependencies. Existing studies usually control synchronization skews by inserting buffer-ing latencies at the media receivers. But due to the real-time nature of interactive multimedia in both two-site and multi-site applications, these approaches can impact the communication interactivity and media signal intelligibility, and affect the subjective satisfactions of end users. To address these issues, we propose a novel and systematic synchronization framework for teleim-mersion, and more generally, distributed interactive multimedia systems. We first discuss a new multi-dimensional synchronization specification model that captures the scalability of multi-modal devices, the heterogeneity of multimedia, and the diversity of the end user activities in the next-generation multimedi