Multimedia Applications of the Wavelet Transform

Description

In the context of the teleteaching project Virtuelle Hochschule Oberrhein, i.e.. Virtual University of the Upper Rhine Valley (VIROR). which aims to establish a semi-virtual university, many lectures and seminars were transmitted between remote locations. We thus encountered the problem of scalability of a video stream for different access bandwidths in the Internet. A substantial contribution of this dissertation is the introduction of the wavelet transform into hierarchical video coding and the recommendation of parameter settings based on empirical surveys. Furthermore, a prototype implementation of a hierarchical client-server video program proves the principal feasibility of a wavelet-based, nearly arbitrarily scalable application.Mathematical transformations of digital signals constitute a commonly underestimated problem for students in their first semesters of study. Motivated by the VIROR project, we spent a considerable amount of time and effort on the exploration of approaches to enhance mathematical topics with multimedia; both the technical design and the didactic integration into the curriculum are discussed. In a large field trial on traditional teaching versus multimedia-enhanced teaching, in which the students were assigned to different learning settings, not only the motivation, but the objective knowledge gained by the students was measured. This allows us to objectively rate positive the efficiency of the teaching modules developed in the scope of this dissertation.