John Baras invited speaker at MIT Enterprise Forum

Professor John S. Baras (ECE/ISR) was an invited featured speaker at the MIT Enterprise Forum (MITEF)-hosted Tech Transfer Lab on May 22, 2007, held in Arlington, Va. This year’s MITEF Transfer Lab focused on mobile technologies. The event showcased the area’s hottest technologies developed at area universities and federal labs. The audience consisted of technical experts, scientists, engineers, interested small/medium size companies, attorneys, marketing and business consultants, investors, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs interested in licensing the technology.

Dr. Baras presented his invention (joint with ISR alumni Junfeng Gu and Yimin Jiang; Dr. Baras was their advisor) of a new method and apparatus for conditional access in broadcast/multicast systems.

Following the rapid expansion of the commercial broadcasting industry, conditional access systems have been deployed extensively to meet consumers' needs. These systems are used to provide services to authorized customers such as cable TV, satellite TV, wireless services subscribers. In fact, some programs are only accessible to those who have made payments to the program providers. In today's growing E-commerce environment, conditional access is imperative to profitable digital broadcasting. The University of Maryland invention developed a low-cost and reliable conditional access scheme. The novel approach successfully utilizes arithmetic coding to achieve encryption purposes for conditional access in digital broadcast systems at a lower cost. Further, an adaptive source symbol frequency model is used, which adds more security to the system.

The invention is part of US patent 7,006,568, “3D Wavelet Based Video Codec with Human Perceptual Model”, issued to Baras, Gu and Jiang on February 28, 2006. As Dr. Baras stated "this is really two patents issued as one." The key invention uses an integrated approach of signal representation via three-dimensional wavelets, perceptual models of the human vision system, and advanced compression techniques, to provide efficient and substantial compression of video streams. The innovative scheme is simultaneously progressive (i.e. it can ‘match’ the quality and resolution of receiving devices) as well as perceptionally lossless (i.e. the compression is not perceived as loss of image quality by the human vision system).

Published June 13, 2007