TASCA

The project "TASCA" is intended to face, from an overall business sector point of view, a series of themes related to the audiovisual communications field and common to applications like video-intercom, teleworking, teleteaching, telemedicine and video-surveillance. The approach wants to be open and based on standards oriented to the involvement of versatile modules, usable in various application scenarios.
The workplan takes the expertises of project partners (Aethra s.p.a., Farfisa s.r.l., Bsoft, A3LAB-Univpm) into account and is characterised by two main elements: technological research and "module" development. From them it is expected that products and vertical applications will come out.
The usage scenario is the domestic one, but all systems are seen (and will be developed as) "network elements", able to interact with the “Next Generation Network”, according to which the multimedia terminal play a central role in the network itself.
From a pure technological perspective, the project covers new and complex topics as full-band audio coding, stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation, high-resolution and scalable video coding just to name a few. The objective is developing modules with the following characteristics:

inter-operable, i.e. able to guarantee the choice between different suppliers;
polyvalent, i.e. usable in various application scenarios;
aperti ad estensioni future;
able to guarantee a wide range of basic services;
able to support IP telephony, WEB applications, video-intercom, videoconference;
including a WEB server for remote management and content sharing;
representing suitable platforms for development of vertical applications like teleworking, video-surveillance, home-care and home automation applications.

Now, a more detailed description of modules, technologies, related products and applications. MODULES

digital "outdoor" video-intercom module
digital "indoor" video-intercom module
module for IP telephony and “standard definition” video-conference, WEB browser, IM (instant messaging), email service
module for "high-definition" and multipoint video conference

TECHNOLOGIES

Scalable video coding
Audio speech enhancement preprocessing for multimodal front-end
Full-band Audio codec according to the ISO (AAC-LD) standard and the ITU standard (at early stage of definition)
Stereophonic Acoustic echo cancellation
Security
Firewall/NAT traversal