At this moment, our image archive supports only on IE4 and above. To view this interactive demonstration, you have to temporary disable some security settings in your Internet Explorer browser as we have yet to apply for a proper commercial digital certificate for the ActiveX plugin.

To do so, click on < Tools > < Internet Options > on your browser. Click on < Security tab >, and select the globe image named < Internet > and then scroll the < Security Level for this zone to LOW >. Click < APPLY > and then < OK >. It is fine if you receive prompts that the plugin is insecure, etc., as I can guarantee you that it will be safe; just that we did not pay commercial firms like VeriSign to certify our research program.

• Highly scalable compressed bitstreams that support
  
  • Bandwidth and quality scalability with arbitrary granularity,
    
  • Picture size/display resolution scalability,
    
  • Picture playback rate scalability,
    
  • Alphabet/colour depth scalability,
    
    This feature is especially useful in heterogeneous network environment and video-on-demand applications. In first case, different users can choose video and image quality according to the network bandwidth and hardware configurations. In second case, the video is compressed only once but can produce video streams of different qualities;
    
• Partial image retrieving, that is, in a compressed large image, user can choose only part of the image to decompress and view. This feature is very useful for very large image browsing system in which user can choose part of the image for detail inspection;
  
• Decompressing during transmission. This feature is useful when increase response speed of large image transmission system is required;
  
• User's hardware scalability (CPU, memory, network, etc.);
  
• Real-time software encoding and decoding.
  
  Because of these special features of wavelet algorithms, WavPRESS is potentially useful in a wide range of applications, including:
  
• Multi-quality live broadcasting/multicasting;
  
  In the broadcasting/multicasting situation, the server needs only to send out video streams once, and different user can receive different quality video according to bandwidth and hardware configurations. This will decrease the total amount of network communication.
  
• Video-on-demand services for multiple heterogeneous receivers over diverse networks.
  
  In the case of video-on-demand (one to one communication), each client can adjust his or her requirements according to the bandwidth and hardware configurations. This will increase the number of diverse clients that the server can support.
  
• Universal messaging system;
  
  The equipment for personal communication will become more and more diverse in the future. Different people may have different communication equipment, such as palmtop, handheld PC, mobile phone, desktop PC. All these equipment will be connected via the Internet. The scalability features of WavPRESS will make it possible for a particular user to communicate with the others using communication equipment of different capabilities according to the bandwidth and hardware availability.
  
• Picture archiving, database browsing and progressive transmission;