Thinh Nguyen

Graduate Student

Mailing : 211-19 Cory Hall #1772,

EECS Department, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-1772
Phone: (510) 643-1587
Email: thinhq@eecs.berkeley.edu

Homepage: http://www-video.eecs.berkeley.edu/~thinhq

My resume : (Microsoft word), (html)

I graduated last December and will be an assistant professor at Oregon State University in September 2004. Please use the following emails to contact me: gravitylens@gmail.com or thinhq@eecs.oregonstate.edu. Thanks.

Hi there, welcome to my homepage. My name is Thinh. I am a n^th year graduate student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at UC. Berkeley. I am working in the Video and Image Processing Laboratory (VIP) under the supervision of professor Avideh Zakhor. My current research interests are signal processing techniques and network protocols to facilitate video streaming over the Internet.

Research Abstract

Path diversity media streaming

Packet loss, long end-to-end delay, and insufficient bandwidth pose significant challenges for designing and deploying delay sensitive multimedia applications over the Internet. In this work, we developed a system for concurrent media streaming via multiple routes created using either multiple senders or relay nodes to increase available bandwidth, reduce packet loss and delay. In particular, the system design incorporates considerations from architecture to network protocols, to channel and source coding.

Architecture: For moderate delay tolerant streaming applications, I designed and implemented a system for simultaneous media streaming on multiple routes to a single receiver using multiple senders. For interactive and live streaming applications, the system allows a single sender to send packets simultaneously on both default Internet and redundant paths to the receiver. To create the redundant path, the sender sends packets to the relay node, which forwards the packets to the receiver. The relay node selection algorithm is designed to ensure that packets traveling through the relay node take a different underlying physical path than that of the default Internet path between the sender and receiver.

Network protocol: Developed a transport protocol to synchronize simultaneous media streaming to the receiver via multiple routes. In particular, the protocol employs the rate allocation and packet partition algorithms. The rate algorithm determines the sending rate on each route in order to minimize the packet loss, while the packet partition algorithm ensures that no sender sends the same packets and at the time, minimizes the probability of late packets.

Channel coding: Showed theoretically and empirically that Forward Error Correction is more effective by streaming media simultaneously over multiple routes at appropriate sending rates.

Source coding: Designed a network adaptive matching pursuits based multiple description video codec. Multiple description coding is an error resilient source coding scheme that generates multiple encoded bitstreams of the source with the aim of providing an acceptable reconstruction quality of the source when only one description is received, and improved quality when multiple descriptions are available. My network adaptive multiple description matching pursuits scheme is designed to produce unequal descriptions of the source based on network characteristics of each route, hence providing superior visual quality.

Work

In an earlier life (1994) , I worked on PBX switches for ROLM-Siemens. In 1995, I joined Intel Development Lab where I developed a customized database system to support automation design tools. After that, I moved to the Merced processor design group to work on caches for multi-processors system. From 1996-1998, I was a graphics researcher in Intel’s Microcomputer Research Lab , working on fast methods for 3-D visualization and navigation in human body. Before starting my new life at Berkeley, I spent 6 months in my office at the Redmond Empire, optimizing DirectX6 for Pentium III.

Publications

"Path Diversity Media Streaming over Best Effort Packet Switched Networks" ; Dissertation, U.C. Berkeley, 2003

T. Nguyen and A. Zakhor, "Multiple Sender Distributed Video Streaming" ; To appear in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

T. Nguyen and A. Zakhor, "Matching Pursuits Based Multiple Description Video Coding for Lossy Environment" ; Sept, International Conference on Image Processing 2003, Barcelona, Spain. Invited Paper

T. Nguyen, P. Mehra , A. Zakhor, "Path Diversity and Bandwidth Allocation for Multimedia Streaming" ; . ICME 2003, July 6-9, Baltimore, MD, USA. Invited Paper

T. Nguyen and A. Zakhor, "Path Diversity with Forward Error Correction (PDF) System for Packet Switched Networks" ; . INFOCOM 2003, April 1-5, San Francisco CA, USA.

T. Nguyen and A. Zakhor, "Distributed Video Streaming with Forward Error Correction" ; Packet Video Workshop 2002, Pittsburgh PA, USA. Best Paper Award!

T. Nguyen and A. Zakhor, "Protocols for Distributed Video Streaming" International Conference on Image Processing 2002, Rochester NY, USA.

T. Nguyen and A. Zakhor, "Distributed Video Streaming over the Internet" ;in Proceedings of SPIE Conference on Multimedia Computing and Networking, San Jose, California, January 2002.

T. Nguyen , A. Zakhor, and K. Yelick, ``Performance Analysis of an H.263 Video Encoder for IRAM'' in Proceedings of the International Conference on Image Processing, Vancouver, Canada, September 2000, Vol. 3, pp. 98-101.

T. Nguyen, “ Performance Analysis of an H.263 Video Encoder for IRAM ,” UCB Master Thesis 1999.

M. Brady, K. Jung, H.T. Nguyen; T. Nguyen, “Interactive Volume Navigation” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol.4, (no.3), IEEE, July-Sept. 1998. p.243-56

M. Brady, K. Jung, H.T. Nguyen; T. Nguyen, “Two-phase Perspective Ray Casting for Interactive Volume Navigation.” Proceedings. Visualization '97 New York, NY, USA: IEEE, 1997.

T. Nguyen, “Parallel Implementation of Shear-Warp Technique for Volume Visualization on Pentium II”. Intel Technical Report, 1996.

Personal

The above picture was taken at my friend’s wedding in Seattle. I am a classical musician at heart. Before coming to graduate school, I used to play violin and piano at weekend weddings. Here are some of my pictures enjoying myself :). I am also an amateur composer. Email me if you are interested in rather a small collection of my own piano compositions which usually reflect a blended flavor between classical and new age works. Finally, I love to travel, here are the places that I have been to.