An online still image distribution system, IMcast, was developed to support instruction in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University. The main objective of this project was to build a system that could quickly dispense medical images from an instructor's workstation to PCs on student desktops with no degradation in image quality. IMcast uses a client/server paradigm and is designed to take advantage of the message-based Microsoft Windows operating system. Images are transmitted using IP multicast and a negative acknowledgement protocol. Development of large software applications dictates a modular design. Object orientation facilitates this organization by forcing software components to interact with one another by way of public interfaces. The object-oriented IMcast architecture is presented.
['Eric R. Kass', 'Philip K. McKinley']
IMcast: an object-oriented tool for image multicasting