Touch is currently seen as the modality that will complement audition and vision as a third media stream over the Internet in a variety of future haptic applications which will allow full immersion and that will, in many ways, impact society. Nevertheless, the high requirements of these applications demand networks which allow ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) for the challenging task of applying the required Quality of Service (QoS) for maintaining the user’s Quality of Experience (QoE) at optimum levels. In this survey, we enlist, discuss and evaluate methodologies and technologies of the necessary infrastructure for haptic communication. Furthermore, we focus on how the fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks will allow haptic applications to take life, in combination with the haptic data communication protocols, bilateral teleoperation control schemes and haptic data processing needed. Finally, we state the lessons learned throughout the surveyed research material along with the future challenges and infer our conclusions.

The IEEE ``Tactile Internet'' (TI) Standards working group (WG), designated the numbering IEEE 1918.1, undertakes pioneering work on the development of standards for the TI. This paper describes the WG, its intentions, and its developing baseline standard and the associated reasoning behind that and touches on a further standard already initiated under its scope: IEEE 1918.1.1 on ``Haptic Codecs for the TI.'' IEEE 1918.1 and its baseline standard aim to set the framework and act as the foundations for the TI, thereby also serving as a basis for further standards developed on TI within the WG. This paper discusses the aspects of the framework such as its created TI architecture, including the elements, functions, interfaces, and other considerations therein, as well as the novel aspects and differentiating factors compared with, e.g., 5G Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication, where it is noted that the TI will likely operate as an overlay on other networks or combinations of networks. Key foundations of the WG and its baseline standard are also highlighted, including the intended use cases and associated requirements that the standard must serve, and the TI's fundamental definition and assumptions as understood by the WG, among other aspects.

The Tactile Internet will enable users to physically explore remote environments and to make their skills available across distances. An important technological aspect in this context is the acquisition, compression, transmission, and display of haptic information. In this paper, we present the fundamentals and state of the art in haptic codec design for the Tactile Internet. The discussion covers both kinesthetic data reduction and tactile signal compression approaches. We put a special focus on how limitations of the human haptic perception system can be exploited for efficient perceptual coding of kinesthetic and tactile information. Further aspects addressed in this paper are the multiplexing of audio and video with haptic information and the quality evaluation of haptic communication solutions. Finally, we describe the current status of the ongoing IEEE standardization activity P1918.1.1 which has the ambition to standardize the first set of codecs for kinesthetic and tactile information exchange across communication networks.

Image restoration is a long-standing problem in image processing and low-level computer vision. Recently, discriminative convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches have attracted considerable attention due to their superior performance. However, most of these frameworks are designed for one specific image restoration task; hence, they seldom show high performance on other image restoration tasks. To address this issue, we propose a flexible deep CNN framework that exploits the frequency characteristics of different types of artifacts. Hence, the same approach can be employed for a variety of image restoration tasks by adjusting the architecture. For reducing the artifacts with similar frequency characteristics, a quality enhancement network that adopts residual and recursive learning is proposed. Residual learning is utilized to speed up the training process and boost the performance; recursive learning is adopted to significantly reduce the number of training parameters as well as boost the performance. Moreover, lateral connections transmit the extracted features between different frequency streams via multiple paths. One aggregation network combines the outputs of these streams to further enhance the restored images. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed framework with three representative applications: image compression artifacts reduction (CAR), image denoising, and single image super-resolution (SISR). Extensive experiments confirm that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets for these applications.

The tactile internet will enable a new range of capabilities to enable immersive remote operations and interactions with a physical world. Tactile internet use cases span over many fields, from remote operation of industrial applications in, e.g., hazardous environments, via remote-controlled driving in a fully automated intelligent transport system, to remote surgery where the unique expert skills can be delivered to different locations in the world. Fifth-generation (5G) communication will play a fundamental part in this tactile internet vision, as it will provide necessary capabilities for the demanding communication needs in terms of reliability and low latency, for operators or teleoperated systems that are connected wirelessly. This paper provides an overview of tactile internet services and haptic interactions and communication. The 5G functionality for ultrareliable and low-latency services is described in depth and it is shown how 5G new radio (NR) and the evolved long-term evolution (LTE) radio interface can achieve guaranteed low-latency wireless transmission. The costs for providing reliable and low-latency wireless transmission in terms of reduced spectral efficiency and coverage are discussed. The 5G system architecture with a software-based network design based on a distributed cloud platform is presented. It is shown how the 5G network is configured for tactile internet services via multidomain orchestration.