Section: Software and Platforms

OMiSCID Middleware for Distributed Multimodal Perception

Participants : Rémi Barraquand, Amaury Nègre, Patrick Reignier, Dominique Vaufreydaz [correspondant] .

Middleware, Distributed perceptual systems

OMiSCID is lightweight middleware for dynamic integration of perceptual services in interactive environments. This middleware abstracts network communications and provides service introspection and discovery using DNS-SD (DNS-based Service Discovery  [31] ). Services can declare simplex or duplex communication channels and variables. The middleware supports the low-latency, high-bandwidth communications required in interactive perceptual applications. It is designed to allow independently developed perceptual components to be integrated to construct user services. Thus our system has been designed to be cross-language, cross-platform, and easy to learn. It provides low latency communications suitable for audio and visual perception for interactive services.

OMiSCID has been designed to be easy to learn in order to stimulate software reuse in research teams and is revealing to have a high adoption rate. To maximize this adoption and have it usable in projects involving external partners, the OMiSCID middleware has been released under an open source licence. To maximize its target audience, OMiSCID is available from a wide variety of programming languages: C++, Java, Python and Matlab. A website containing informations and documentations about OMiSCID has been set up to improve the visibility and promote the use of this middleware.

The OMiSCID graphical user interface (GUI) is an extensible graphical application that facilitates analysis and debugging of service oriented applications. The core functionality of this GUI is to list running services, their communication channels and their variables. This GUI is highly extensible and many modules (i.e. plugins) have been created by different members of the team: figure 2 shows an example of some of these modules. OMiSCID GUI is based on the Netbeans platform and thus inherits from its dynamic installation and update of modules.