Video summarisation: A conceptual framework and survey of the state of the art

This is the post-print (final draft post-refereeing) version of the article. Copyright @ 2007 Elsevier Inc.Video summaries provide condensed and succinct representations of the content of a video stream through a combination of still images, video segments, graphical representations and textual descriptors. This paper presents a conceptual framework for video summarisation derived from the research literature and used as a means for surveying the research literature. The framework distinguishes between video summarisation techniques (the methods used to process content from a source video stream to achieve a summarisation of that stream) and video summaries (outputs of video summarisation techniques). Video summarisation techniques are considered within three broad categories: internal (analyse information sourced directly from the video stream), external (analyse information not sourced directly from the video stream) and hybrid (analyse a combination of internal and external information). Video summaries are considered as a function of the type of content they are derived from (object, event, perception or feature based) and the functionality offered to the user for their consumption (interactive or static, personalised or generic). It is argued that video summarisation would benefit from greater incorporation of external information, particularly user based information that is unobtrusively sourced, in order to overcome longstanding challenges such as the semantic gap and providing video summaries that have greater relevance to individual users

A framework for P2P application development

Although Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has become increasingly popular over recent years, there still exist only a very small number of application domains that have exploited it on a large scale. This can be attributed to a number of reasons including the rapid evolution of P2P technologies, coupled with their often-complex nature. This paper describes an implemented abstraction framework that seeks to aid developers in building P2P applications. A selection of example P2P applications that have been developed using this framework are also presented

The use of data-mining for the automatic formation of tactics

This paper discusses the usse of data-mining for the automatic formation of tactics. It was presented at the Workshop on Computer-Supported Mathematical Theory Development held at IJCAR in 2004. The aim of this project is to evaluate the applicability of data-mining techniques to the automatic formation of tactics from large corpuses of proofs. We data-mine information from large proof corpuses to find commonly occurring patterns. These patterns are then evolved into tactics using genetic programming techniques

Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments

Sketch-a-Net that Beats Humans

We propose a multi-scale multi-channel deep neural network framework that, for the first time, yields sketch recognition performance surpassing that of humans. Our superior performance is a result of explicitly embedding the unique characteristics of sketches in our model: (i) a network architecture designed for sketch rather than natural photo statistics, (ii) a multi-channel generalisation that encodes sequential ordering in the sketching process, and (iii) a multi-scale network ensemble with joint Bayesian fusion that accounts for the different levels of abstraction exhibited in free-hand sketches. We show that state-of-the-art deep networks specifically engineered for photos of natural objects fail to perform well on sketch recognition, regardless whether they are trained using photo or sketch. Our network on the other hand not only delivers the best performance on the largest human sketch dataset to date, but also is small in size making efficient training possible using just CPUs.Comment: Accepted to BMVC 2015 (oral

Advances in architectural concepts to support distributed systems design

This paper presents and discusses some architectural concepts for distributed systems design. These concepts are derived from an analysis of limitations of some currently available standard design languages. We conclude that language design should be based upon the careful consideration of architectural concepts. This paper aims at supporting designers by presenting a methodological design framework in which they can reason about the design and implementation of distributed systems. The paper is also meant for language developers and formalists by presenting a collection of architectural concepts which deserve consideration for formal support

A software framework for the development of projection-based augmented reality systems

Despite the large amount of methods and applications of augmented reality, there is little homogenization on the software platforms that support them. An exception may be the low level control software that is provided by some high profile vendors such as Qualcomm and Metaio. However, these provide fine grain modules for e.g. element tracking. We are more concerned on the application framework, that includes the control of the devices working together for the development of the AR experience. In this paper we present a software framework that can be used for the development of AR applications based on camera-projector pairs, that is suitable for both fixed, and nomadic setups.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft