Abstract: A tracking system includes an emitter array configured to emit radiation around a subject to be tracked in at least one dimension wherein each emitter or group of emitters is modulated to permit identification of a source of the radiation. A receiver is configured to receive the radiation from the emitter array, wherein one of the emitter array and the receiver are located on the subject to be tracked. A processor is configured to interpret changes in radiation and correlate the changes to a device position to output a device position control signal.

Abstract: A system and method schedules downloading of content files from a content server to a client through a cache server. A user can request a content file for future delivery at a certain service time at a certain location such as a hotspot. A cache server receives these requests and sorts them in an order which depends on the relative service times, and eliminates redundancies by only downloading content files not already stored in the cache server. A scheduling algorithm minimizes the instances of tardiness under the constraint of cache storage capacity.

Abstract: Interlaced video can be encoded in two layers, base layer and enhancement layer. A method for optimizing the encoding of motion vectors for enhancement layer is proposed. It comprises defining various different ways to encode the motion vectors, estimate the coding costs for each way, and select the way with the lowest coding cost. The various ways to encode enhancement layer motion vectors can be combined. Either motion vectors from base layer are reused, resulting in a scaling factor and an update vector, or new motion vectors are calculated. Either forward or backward or bi-directional prediction can be used. Either one frame or multiple frames can be taken as reference. The reference frame can be from the enhancement layer, base layer or both. Either the complete motion vectors are encoded, or only the difference between the motion vector and the corresponding BL motion vector is encoded.

Abstract: There are provided apparatus and methods for parallelizing an encoding process across multiple processors. An apparatus includes a computing resource balancer and a splitter. The computing resource balancer is for assigning encoder instances to respective ones of the multiple processors based on at least one of thread affinity and process affinity. The splitter is for temporally dividing an incoming video sequence into discrete GOPs such that each of the encoder instances is capable of encoding the incoming video sequence in parallel so that each of the discrete GOPs is encoded on a respective one of the multiple processors.