Bastian Molkenthin - Sunshine2k

arrow Studies

For all who are interested in my study, here is a little overview of lectures/labs/seminars I attended till now during my study of computer science at the University of Karlsruhe, from 10/2003 to 12/2008.

(Note: I tried to translate the name of the german lecture names as precise as I cannot guarantee that the translation is correct. But I hope you can somehow imagine what it's about...)

Subject Lecturer SWS

1. Term
Informatics I Goos 4+2
Linear Algebra and Analytic Geometrics I Kühnlein 4+2
Higher Mathematics I (Analysis I) Schmoeger 4+2
Basics of Theory of Probability and Statistics Klar 2+1

2. Term
Informatics II Zitterbart 4+2
Linear Algebra and Analytic Geometrics II Kühnlein 2+1
Higher Mathematics II (Analysis II) Schmoeger 5+2
Physics I for Computer Scientists Blümer 3+1
Numerical Mathematics Scherer 2+1

3. Term
Informatics III Wagner 4+2
Computer Engineering I Asfour 3+1
Physics II for Computer Scientists Blümer 3+1
System Architecture (Practical Work) Liefläder -

4. Term
Informatics IV Schmitt 4+2
Computer Engineering II Brinkschulte 3+1
Electrical Engineering for Computer Scientists Crocoll 2+0

5. Term
System Architecture Liefländer 4+2
Software Engineering Tichy 4
Formal Systems (Logic) Schmitt 4
Algorithm Engineering Wagner 4
Lab "Lego Mindstorm" ITEC Dillman -

6. Term
Cognitive Systems Dillmann/Waibel 4
Computer Architecture Karl 4
Real-Time Systems Brinkschulte 4
Introduction to .NET Tichy 2
Seminar "Modern Software Engineering" FZI -

7. Term
Embedded Systems I Feldbusch 2
Embedded Systems II Henkel 2
Microprocessors for Embedded Systems Karl 2
Parallel Architectures and Programming Tao 2
Software-Engineering for Embedded Systems FZI -
Embedded Security Lazic 1
Automotive Engineering I Unrau 4
Automotive Mechatronics I Ammon 2
Lab "Design of Embedded Application-Specific Processors" CES -

8. Term
Signals, Codes & Chiffres I Lazic 3
Signals, Codes & Chiffres II Geiselmann 3+1
Quanta Cryptography Müller-Quade 2
Fundamentals of Computer Security Röhric 2
Curves and Areas in CAD Prautzsch/Chen 4
Graphical-Geometrical Algorithms Bender 2
Communication & Databases Abeck/Buchmann 4+1
Automotive Engineering II Unrau 2
Intelligent Data Analysis Feldbusch 2
Tutor for Informatics IV - -

9. Term
Applied Differential Geometry Prautzsch 2
Automatic Visual Inspection and Image Processing Beyerer 4
Nets and Point Clouds Prautzsch 2
Introduction to Graphical Data Processing Preuß 2
Introduction to Multimedia Deussen 2
Tutor for Informatics I (1x Tutorial + 2x Computer Exercise Lessons per week).Therefore exists my own tutorial homepage:
Informatics I Tutorial 24 Winter Term 07/08 		- -
Study Thesis at the Institute of Computer Science & Engineering:
Thesis: Implementation of a Monitoring Unit for the Hypertransport Bus System		 Buchty -

10/11. Term
Diploma Thesis at the Chair for Embedded Systems:
"Development of a Power-Aware Rate Controller for the H.264 Video Encoder".
Click here for further details. 		Henkel, Shafique -


Lego Mindstorm" Laboratory (@IPR)

The exercise was realised in a team of three students. Everyone had to build a roadworthy robot (well, playing lego can be really fun :-) The main assignment was of course the engineering of the software: in a special zoned area there were several 'stations' of form of straps on the floor. Each robot had to pass at least one of these stations once (they had light sensors at their undersides). After that they had to find their way home and park there. The most difficult job was the implementation of the communication per infrared between the three robots: they had to decide themselves which robot(s) visit(s) the non-passed station(s). At the end they had to meet again in the house and shut down themselves. We took special care for paricular cases (what should happen of one or more robots drop out?). We coded in NQC.





Seminar "Modern Software Engineering" (@FZI)

In summer term 06, I attended the seminar 'Modern Software Engineering' at the Research Center of Information Technologies and worked out an elaboration and a presentation of the topic "Generative Programming". Only in German available.

Downloads:


Laboratory "Design of Embedded Application-Specific Processors" (@CES)

In this laboratory we implemented special instructions directly in hardware, among other things a compare-instruction (which not existed yet in the instruction set) or an instruction which calculated the hamming distance of two 32 bit words. With ASIPMeister, we defined new instructions, new instruction types and complete new functional units (in VHDL) and designed their behaviour in the single pipeline stages. After the automatic synthesis we tested our results in ModelSim and on a Xilinx FPGA board. For estimations (like power consumption or chip area) we used Xilinx ISE.
The speed difference beween the software implementation and the hardware one is extreme.
More information is available here.
Slides with the result of our last project are available here (1,7MB).

FPGA asipmeister


Study Thesis "Implementation of a Monitoring-Unit for the HyperTransport-Bus"

In winter term 07/08 I completed succesfully my study thesis at the Institute for Computer Engineering (Chair Prof. Karl). I was provided with the HTX-Board (a FPGA with a Virtex FX-100 with HyperTransport Interface) in an AMD Athlon-System and the so-called HT-Core - a HyperTransport device available as Verilog Source, synthezisable with Xilinx ISE. Starting form this, my challenge was to create a monitoring unit in VHDL which logs all read and write accesses using the HyperTransport Bus in a content-addressable memory. If the memory is full, all logged information should be send to a buffer in main memory and from there saved to a file for further analysis. Therefore I had to use a kernel driver which allocated a non-cachable DMA region und sent its physical address to the board. I programmed a usel-level application in C under Linux which executes several read and writes accesses on the board (resp. on the mapped board memory) and saved all logged infos to file.
Especially difficult was the linkage to the HyperTransport bus system cause there was no real simulation option available, the synthesis and upload to the board lasted nearly an hour and even very small bugs caused the system to hang during startup because the board was not properly recognized as a PCI device. Also by executing board accesses there were often problems....


HTX Board
HTX Board

Diploma Thesis "Development of a Power-Aware Rate Controller for the H.264 Video Encoder"

In June 2008, I started my diploma thesis at the the Chair for Embedded Systems (Prof. Henkel) with the title "Development of a Power-Aware Rate Controller for H.264 Video Encoder" - consisting of diving into the hot multimedia topic video encoding (and H.264 is quite complicating), changing the existing Rate Controller and Rate-Distortion-Optimization by improving their computational complexity while not loosing too much quality, coding my changes into the Reference Software (Open source, in C) and finally porting my algorithms to a FPGA. I must admit the beginning was not that easy and it took some time till I really understood the whole encoding process, especially the Lagrangina Optimization and the models used in Rate Controller, but my attempt pointed out to work extremely nice: I achieved a significant speedup by predicting the encoding modes exploiting image statistics analysis on the video frames. My PID-based Rate Controller also prioritize more important (=textured with motion) regions than background area, resulting in better subjective quality. In fact, I really did many modifications and I am absolutely proud of my diploma thesis.
Update: I am not allowed to publish my diploma thesis here, but have a look at the two linked papers below - in fact they are some sort of summary of my thesis!

Diploma Thesis Flyer (PDF, 250kb)
Diploma Thesis: Table of Contents (PDF, 150kb)

Received the FZI Prize (Forschungszentrum für Informatik) for Best Diploma Thesis Award!

My thesis was the base of two published articles (see my mentor's page for more information):

Below you see a picture of my tool I called YuvViewer. It's just a spin-off product I coded myself in the evenings during my diploma thesis (yes, that's correct, it's not an official part of my thesis!). The reason was that I needed a comfortable and fast way to investigate the image & motion characterics of a large set of videos (in 4:2:0 YUV format). YuvViewer offers multiple useful features combined in one application: many sequences can be opened and played at the same time (even synchronically). An information window can be activated to show the macroblock image statistics under the current cursor position in real-time (beside frame statistics). This information can be also saved to a text file. Sequences can be altered, e.g. the edge map can be displayed and/or only the luminance component. Noisy, blurred, darken and brighten sequences have also been generated with this tool. (Altered) sequences can be party or wholly saved to new .yuv sequences. An implemented modification into the H.264 reference software saves the chosen mode for each macroblock along with its SAD value to a file. This file can be loaded by YuvViewer and examined on the fly. Additional features include zooming of sequences, computing the PSNR value per frame of two sequences and setting the playback frame rate. It was coded in C# and requires therefore Windows XP or Windows Vista with an installed .Net framework (Version 2.0 or higher). Unfortunately I am not allowed to publish source or binary.

Picture of my tool YuvViewer


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