Mjukvarurealiserad bildtelefoni - Umeå universitet

Abstract
With the ever–increasing popularity of the Internet a staggering increase in the number of
computer users has followed the last five years. The daily lives and communication patterns of
ordinary people have been forever altered by the presence of computers in the home as well as in
the workplace. Today there are few people in the developed world who have not heard of the
Internet or used it, the question is no longer if the internet will change the way we communicate –
but how it has changed it and how it in the future will change it.
This thesis, which has been produced at Umeå University, attempts to provide a glimpse of the
theories and techniques used in construction of image based communication tools for use on the
Internet. The focus has been directed toward image based telephony systems and how these can be
produced without the support of dedicated hardware.
The thesis consists of three main parts: it starts off with a short introduction to the field of image
based telephony, continues with a theoretical overview of (image) compression and cryptography
respectively, and concludes with a model for a software realised image based telephony system.
Hopefully it will serve as a comprehensive introduction to the field for the interested reader.
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